


How to Train Your Kaiju

by psikeval



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-10
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2017-12-23 00:59:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/920116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psikeval/pseuds/psikeval
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You don’t wanna hurt me,” he repeats, and steps forward, holding out his hand.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This wasn't supposed to happen.

It’s a punishment, actually, being sent to scour the coast. And it’s effective in the sense that it’s both dull and depressing as hell, stepping around corpses of whales and sharks and hundreds of fish, deep-sea dwellers mixed with the tiniest minnows and all drying dead on the sand. The appearance of the Kaiju meant nothing short of annihilation for the Pacific Ocean’s ecosystems.

84% of the Great Barrier Reef was crushed in the first attack on Australia, and by now the satellite images show nothing but empty water; the teams of marine biologists who’ve been moving in these days aren’t finding much more than crushed debris from the polyps. One of the seven wonders of the world wiped away, and the _species_ , fuck—not just rare and endangered species, but _endemics_ , gone off the face of the earth. Lost. 

Newt’s not ashamed to say he’s teared up a bit, thinking about that.

He gets that everyone thinks it’s stupid, nearsighted or obsessed or whatever. Possible end of humanity, we’ve got our survival to worry about, for the love of god man where are your priorities, all of that. And it’s not like he bugged anybody about it, even that awful night Hermann ran the numbers on how many species the jaegers and kaiju were likely to have already destroyed, and—it was the _possibility_ that got to Newt, really, in the end, he was a man who lived for potential and discovery and it was, he’d said after maybe throwing some stuff, such a damn _waste_.

(Hermann just frowned and then brought him beer at 2 a.m. when Newt still couldn’t sleep, patted him awkwardly on the shoulder and frowned some more before he went home.)

There’s a comet grouper, only about half a meter long, twitching helplessly in a shallow pool of seawater. Lucky, Newt thinks grimly. If the copper shark’s body hadn’t washed up just so, it wouldn’t have trapped the tiny bit of water keeping the big fish alive. He steps closer and ignores the slick, lumpy layer of dead creatures that carpets the beaches from the Chukchi Peninsula to every island of Indonesia. Or rather, he swallows, tells himself he’s ignoring it, and keeps his eyes fixed on the grouper.

He grabs it in both arms and walks past the shoreline, knee-deep, lowers the fish carefully and watches it swim away, because there’s got to be worse things to be than obsessed.

 

\--

 

Punishment isn’t quite the word, Newt decides about an hour later. His clothes are dripping wet and he’s been bitten by a disgruntled moray eel, is dabbing absently at the blood on his hand. It’s more that he did some pretty stupid, reckless stuff in the last week, and while things are settling down there’s probably more than one person who’d like him miles away from the lab. Just in case he tries to Drift with a bit of liver or something, who the hell knows, the baby Kaiju got confiscated immediately, which he is still—for the record—pissed about.

They need people, though, to comb the beaches like this and look for things that shouldn’t be there. Jaeger parts or bits of Kaiju, anything newly returning civilians aren’t supposed to get their hands on. A whole bunch of people on the Shatterdome staff have been sent out to do it.

He’s getting closer to the Dazhou harbor, walking south around land that was evacuated years ago, when he sees it up ahead. Movement, something big, going into the forest about half a kilometer away. The trees jostle audibly as it moves. And it’s probably just a normal predator, or even an elephant, their range expanded in the absence of humans. Still, Newt pushes up his glasses with his less bloody hand and starts walking a little faster.

After all, he’s meant to be looking for anything unusual.

 

\--

 

Even if he wasn’t sure he’d seen something, the land ahead would have convinced him. The bodies here have been stripped down to bone, and not by decay or the flocks of scavenging birds. On the larger carcasses still partly intact—another shark, and dolphins that look as if the tide washed them in together— flesh has been ripped away in huge chunks and bones spat out half-crushed. Those scraps would normally have attracted at least a few birds, but when Newt thinks about it, he hasn’t actually seen any all day.

It rules out the elephant theory, to say the least.

There’s not enough clear sand to notice any tracks; looking back, Newt can’t even see his own path over dead things, driftwood, and the detritus of shipwrecks. But up by the tree line there’s too much crushed and broken foliage for coincidence, more than even the years’ worth of jaeger-and-kaiju-made tsunami should account for. And it looks centered, despite the chaos. Not quite a trail, but certainly closer than not.

Honestly, he thinks about calling it in, but they might tell him to wait, and he’d really rather stop standing around staring at destruction and start looking for the cause. So he wipes his hand on his shirt, ignoring the stain, and starts making his way inland.

 

\--

 

He doesn’t think that it is, for the record. Not here, not when the rift is closed, and certainly not preying on washed-up marine life. On a scale of kaiju-worthy mayhem and destruction, Newt is pretty sure scavenging doesn’t even rate. Especially these days.

It’s just a stupid passing thought, if anything, and he dismisses it with the ruthlessness of someone who’s pushed aside of lot of things he used to wish were true. 

He trips right over the kaiju’s tail.

 

\--

 

As kaiju go, it is not very large. It’s miniscule, in fact, only twice as big as the average grizzly, with an odd length to its legs that just screams ‘youth,’ and Newt’s brain quickly projects a full-grown version about the size of a nice two-story house, like the place where he rented a room in Cambridge while he was teaching, the one with the window that never opened more than six inches, which sucked, and he’s keenly aware of how much his brain has gone off the rails but in his own defense _holy shit_.

“Holy shit!” he yells, which would be unhelpful even if he could somehow hear himself over the monster’s shriek of displeasure. Even in a Category 1, a sound like that would shake the earth, rattle buildings and shatter glass for a mile in every direction.

From such a small one, it’s practically... cute.

_No_. Newt actually hits himself on the head, leaving dirt smeared on his forehead. No, it isn’t cute, it is still a horrible monster that is about to kill him and leave his body on the forest floor for a late-night snack. Now is the time for escaping, pronto. Even if it’s only the second young kaiju known to have existed on earth, even if he’s been _itching_ to find out how natural births figure into a species engineered and controlled to within an inch of their scaly lives.

He scrambles back on the trampled foliage of the forest floor, still staring.

The kaiju, having whipped its tail far away from Newt, rumbles and stares back.

Its eyes are blue-black, and a little more prominent than usual. This close, Newt can see two sets of eyelids closing and opening diagonally, one clear and the other so solidly armored that it clicks quietly shut. The shape of its head is relatively smooth, with ridges like streamlines but no horns or protruding armor plates, almost raptor-like for all that it’s too heavy. The largest of the head ridges runs from the center of its face along the spine, all the way down its tail.

The feet are talon-like, with heavy black claws, under legs just thick enough to support its body, but almost slender-looking for a kaiju. It looks like it would be fast, given the chance, but it hasn’t moved a millimeter since their staring contest began.

He wonders if it was kaiju more like this that entered the world in the time of the dinosaurs, only to find an unsuitable atmosphere and predators that easily outmatched them. Is this closer to the original species, whatever they were before they were turned into someone’s attack force?

_And how the hell did it get here?_

 

\--

 

Newt being Newt, he has a theory, of course.

It goes back to the pregnant kaiju, Otachi, that died in Hong Kong. He’d wondered about that, as soon as he had time to wonder, because as a member of a species being engineered, modified and artificially grown, it made no sense at all for Otachi to be pregnant. Not intentionally. Drifting with the kaiju had given no sense that they even _had_ reproductive habits anymore, let alone that they’d be encouraged to breed unsupervised.

“I think there’s something wrong with all of them,” he’d announced, following Hermann around the lab in clear violation of the hazmat tape. “Name me one infant, just one, that can pop prematurely out of the womb and want to attack things. Not an animal that size that still needs an umbilical cord, I mean, it could barely get its legs underneath itself, and it was _suffocating_ , and still trying to eat me? Seriously fucked-up priorities, man. There is no way that’s natural.”

“It’s an unnatural species,” Hermann snapped at him. “They are made to attack.” He tried to step around Newt, but Newt just got in his way again, earning a scowl.

“Oh, come on! Show me the genetic marker for blind murderous rage.”

Hermann growled that he was about to give a concrete _demonstration_ of it, which did at least get Newt to retreat to his own side of the room. It did not, however, come remotely close to making him shut up.

“I mean, obviously there’s aggression, right, and—I don’t know, maybe it makes sense for that to be more pronounced in kaiju. But seriously, when we Drifted together—” he steamrolled over the words as if it would take away the twitch in Hermann’s shoulders “—did they seem that aggressive to you? Like, unusually? More than us?”

Hermann sighed, cracked his neck and sat down. “Like you said. They are following orders.”

“Right, exactly! And to be fair, they do seem pretty angry about that, which they take out on us, but—my point is, I don’t think kaiju were meant to reproduce naturally. After that much genetic engineering? I’m not even sure the creators thought it was possible, so, what if it happened by accident? What if the reason the baby’s brain was a little off—you felt that too, right?” he interrupts himself and waits for Hermann’s reluctant nod. “What if it wasn’t just the fact that it was too young? What if there were some kind of, of developmental defects when kaiju tried to reproduce in an uncontrolled setting, something off with the baby’s DNA?”

“Something wrong with all of them,” Hermann echoed, and Newt beamed at him.

 

\--

 

Granted, he doesn’t see anything wrong with this one, and it seems gratifyingly reluctant to chew his face off, but Newt reasons that if there _is_ a pattern of birth defects in natural-born kaiju, there’s no reason for them all to be the same. Some kind of organic dementia in one could mean organ defects, blindness, god knows what else in others.

_Maybe stunted growth, too,_ he thinks, watching the kaiju’s tail sweep back and forth.

He stands up slowly, carefully, with his hands held palm-out as if a kaiju will understand the gesture. “Heyyy, buddy,” he says slowly. “Do you know who I am? Did you see me? I guess all the others did, huh, so why not you.” He edges closer as he speaks and tries to ignore the hammering of his heart. “So you don’t wanna hurt me, right? I’m kind of counting on that.”

This is almost certainly one of the stupidest things Newt has ever done, but he isn’t sure what _else_ to do. Turn his back on it and hope for the best? Call in, and let somebody from PPDC kill it before he can even figure out what’s going on? No fucking way.

“You don’t wanna hurt me,” he repeats, and steps forward, holding out his hand.

The kaiju stretches its head forward, not lowered like a dog but still curious. It makes a half-musical rattling sound in its throat and, when Newt gets close enough, bumps against his extended forearm with the side of its jaw. That might bruise later, actually, but he’s so far from caring that he barely feels the impact. _It touched me. A kaiju touched me, and I’m still alive._

He reaches carefully to put his fingers on the side of its face, wincing more the closer he gets to its mouth, but it still doesn’t even bare its teeth. “That’s it, yeah?” he half-pleads, feeling only a little unhinged. “Not gonna hurt me. Not gonna…”

Success. His fingertips touch down on the ridge along its jaw, skate nervously up along the thick pebbled scales that feel like every dinosaur he ever imagined except living, breathing, _real_. Newt glances up at its dark left eye, which is watching him with a wary sort of calm, and chokes back slightly hysterical laughter. It butts at him again, into his chest this time; he rocks back on his heels but stays upright, takes it as some kind of permission.

The skin below its chin feels startlingly smooth and fragile, even though it would probably take something large and razor-sharp to give it so much as a papercut. When he runs the back of his hand over it, the kaiju huffs at him, breath that smells like its raw-fish dinner.

“ _Ew_ ,” he says, practically vibrating with delight.

He takes as full an inventory as it will allow, reaching as much as he physically can and keeping an eye on the teeth and the claws. “So we should check you out,” he says while he pats the big back-bending joint in its front leg. “See if there’s something wrong with your insides, maybe, and try to figure out where you came from. I’ve got some nice equipment, but none of it’s with me, and we might have to hide you for a bit. I’m not sure—yeah, okay, bad touch, I got it,” he says, stumbling back from the tail before it can smack his face.

It knows who he is. It has to. There’s no other viable explanation. He has no idea whether it can possibly understand him, but it must recognize him from the Drift, and it doesn’t want to hurt him. Maybe because it’s been totally cut off from its kind, it almost seems to _like_ him.

Which means there’s another person in the world who it will like, too.

“Stay,” Newt tries. “Stay? Are you gonna stay here?”

The kaiju blinks both sets of eyelids, but offers no response.

 

\--

 

“Honey, I’m home!” he yells as he half-runs into the lab, trying to keep the mugs in his hands mostly balanced and not make a total mess.

Newt has actually brought tea a couple times this week. It just sort of… happens. He’ll walk by the nearest break room and the smell of the lemon ginger tea they keep will evoke a sense memory that isn’t even his, a feeling of warm hands and slowly relaxing shoulders and contentment, and before he knows it he’s poured two cups and is taking them to the lab.

Admittedly, he’s done it consciously this time, in the hopes of getting on Hermann’s good side.

Or at least a not-bad side. A side with more pleasant conversation and fewer formal complaints.

A better side, essentially, than the side Newt tends to be on.

“Uh, here.” He shuffles carefully into the practically pristine half of the lab and holds out one mug in a way he hopes is not at all evocative of bribery. “I brought some tea.”

“Thank you,” Hermann says, kind of brusquely, which is much better than the first time Newt did it, when they’d both kind of stared at each other with no idea of quite what to do and had resolved it by not talking for the rest of the day. This time, Hermann takes the tea but doesn’t turn away. “How was your little expedition this morning?”

“Ah! Good! Funny you should ask!” Newt winces internally and tries to dial it down. “I mean, pretty gross overall, what with the beaches covered in dead things, but." 

Hermann’s forehead creases a little.

“I saved some fish, though, which I thought was—”

“Newt.”

“Yeah?”

“What have you found?” Hermann blows gently on the steaming tea, eyebrows raised.

For a moment Newt stares at him with his mouth hanging open a bit, not because he’s surprised Hermann saw through his painful lack of subtlety, but just— what if it’s more than that? It’s slowly sinking in, how much drifting is a two-way street, and maybe little bits of Newt’s psyche are still floating in Hermann’s head, even from the quick-and-dirty drift they pulled with the kaiju.

_Unscientific aside: do not think about “quick and dirty” in relation to Hermann. Distressing._

_(Distracting.)_

“Or, more accurately, what are you hiding?”

Right. Back to the well-earned accusation at hand.

There was never really any way around this, to be honest, and there’s probably no way to break the news gently. He eyes Tank C, the one with part of a spinal cord, and thinks it was probably stupid to try fooling someone who’s been inside his head, even if Hermann still won’t mention it. (He _knew_ Hermann wouldn’t mention it, knows why he hasn’t, which somehow makes avoidance more intimate instead of less, which he knows Hermann knows but they just keep drinking too much of this tea Newt doesn’t even like and there’s no concealing the truth, is there.)

“Okay,” he agrees abruptly. “Okay, so I might’ve found something, just— don’t freak out, okay?”

 

\--

 

Hermann does freak out, but then, Newt already knew that he would.

 

\--

 

“You’re _insane_ ,” says Hermann, hardly for the first time, as Newt slows their borrowed, heavily-modified ATV to a halt. They’re about seventy meters south of where he found the kaiju. He didn’t want the vehicle to startle it, but he had to balance that against Hermann’s ease of mobility on the uneven sand that made his own legs ache after only an hour.

Not that he would ever, ever dare admit that consideration to Hermann.

They make their way up the coast with relatively little fuss; Newt only gets his hand slapped once for trying to grab Hermann’s arm and steady him, and really, he should have known better. Hermann notices the lack of birds in the area much more quickly than Newt had, because he’s one of those people who likes to watch birds flying around and doing _absolutely nothing interesting_ , which Newt has been hassling him about ever since that time with the pigeons.

Hermann also grimaces at the bodies on the beach, but it seems more ‘ _how very undecorative_ ’ and less ‘ _christ, what a crippling blow to regional and global biodiversity._ ’ Fucking mathematicians.

In what seems like no time at all, they are almost to the clearing and Newt is getting a little worried despite himself. What if the kaiju’s good graces were a one-time offer, and this time it decides it wants a lively human snack? Can they possibly escape? But he pushes the feeling aside because someone has to be the cock-eyed optimist here, and it sure as hell isn’t going to be Hermann.

As if on cue, Hermann says, “You know, if both of us were to die out here—”

“I’d go to the grave knowing I was totally wrong,” says Newt, and grins. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

Hermann doesn’t say anything to that, oddly enough; he meets Newt’s eyes but then just kind of stands there. His cheeks are flushed a bit pink, probably from walking in the sea breeze. Finally he swallows, rolls his eyes and starts walking again, muttering “idiot” under his breath.

Just a few paces away, he repeats Newt’s mistake and steps straight into the little clearing without seeing it— though at least he doesn’t trip and fall on his ass. Newt follows quickly, as if his presence could possibly make a difference if the kaiju is feeling testy.

“Good lord,” Hermann breathes, and the kaiju rattles back at him.

 

\--

 

That time with the pigeons went like this:

Newt and Hermann were sent off to California to lecture on some of their biggest findings in Kaiju Science to date; Sydney’s Shatterdome was the central hub of discovery thanks to them, but they needed to make sure the other side of the rim kept up to date. Their new boss Marshal Pentecost packed them onto a plane with a seriously _tragic_ lack of specimens and an admonishment to ‘try not to kill each other,’ and away they went. The trip was hellishly long because no reputable airline would go over the Pacific, and by the time they stumbled off the plane at LAX both of them were jet-lagged out of their goddamn minds.

Their first lecture was cancelled because after checking into their hotel, they split the Ambien Newt had gotten from the stewardess on the JFK to IAD flight, and short of breaking down the door of the room there was no way anyone was going to wake them up. Their second lecture was cancelled because the PPDC’s most brilliant scientists had no idea how to accurately dose controlled-release zolpidem, and when they _did_ wake up it occurred to them to complain about sharing a room. Newt, awake at the right time of day for the first time in half a week, suggested just kicking out other hotel guests to free up a room until the concierge finally was able to communicate to him that everyone was there from Anchorage and Lima and Panama to hear _them_ speak.

Newt accepted this, groaned, and walked to Starbucks for a peace offering.

“You couldn’t get one of your doctorates in pharmacy?” Hermann growled, clutching his venti coconut latte and squinting angrily at anything resembling light.

“Dude, it’s 9 a.m. and we’re awake like normal people. I’m pretty sure everything’s fine.”

“We missed two of our lectures. We could have _died_.”

“Oh my god, how are you such a drama queen? We’ll stay an extra day or two. Calm down.”

They bickered their way through the most bizarre and brilliant presentations their audience had ever seen, interspersed with Q&A sessions that were the academic equivalent of fistfights but still more educational than the average peer-reviewed journal. Their colleagues walked away from the lectures feeling dazed, and deeply grateful that they didn’t have to work within a thousand-mile radius of Drs. Geiszler and Gottlieb.

On Saturday, they technically had the day off, so they went up to San Francisco to meet an independent think tank of scientists who claimed to be making progress in explaining the extreme variations between one kaiju and the next. As Newt suspected (and as Hermann grumbled during the entire train trip north) they were full of shit, but he felt like they should check these things out when they had the chance, just to be sure. 

The somewhat unexpected bonus was that as they left the facility, Hermann actually seemed _grateful_ to be spending years of his life working with Newt instead of those belligerent pot-smoking weirdos. Better the groupie you know, or something like that.

Still, they split up for the afternoon. Newt walked up to the tourist-trap boardwalk around Oblivion Bay, stared at the huge decommissioned jaegers and thought deeply unpleasant things about whatever moron considered this good waste management. He also bought some overpriced nachos and a Magnum ice cream, the latter of which he took along on his walk back down the peninsula to the poorly reconstructed Golden Gate Park.

There weren’t many people around, even on a Saturday, but Newt was so engaged in removing every bit of crunchy chocolate shell with his teeth that he almost didn’t notice the lone figure up ahead, feeding birds on a bench between battered and sad-looking redwoods.

“Seriously,” he said, dropping down next to Hermann, “this is how you’re gonna spend your time?”

“Please, don’t feel obligated to join me,” Hermann replied, his tone dripping with _in fact, please go._

“Oh, trust me, I did not come to the other side of the world just to hang out with _you_ some more _._ ”

Neither of them moved.

Newt put the nearly bare ice cream stick in his mouth and examined the birds crowding around their feet. There were a few small ones that his brain automatically classifed as sparrows, regardless of plumage or however the hell else you were supposed to tell birds apart, but it was mostly just garden-variety pigeons. He was pretty sure they were less useful than rats, and had no idea why anyone would take a vested interest in keeping them alive and well-fed.

He sighed loudly, to make clear that this was totally dumb, and grabbed a slice of bread.

“Is it just me, or are these smaller than the ones in Europe?” 

“Significantly,” Hermann confirmed, sounding almost proud. “Actually, we have several types in Germany, but _Columba livia_ and _Zenaida macroura_ are both smaller than _Columba palumbus._ ”

“Nerd.”

Hermann looked over at him with this awful, almost wounded expression, but when he saw Newt’s smile he made a disgusted noise and the tightness in his shoulders lessened.

“So what’s that one?” Newt asked, elbowing Hermann and pointing at the nearest small not-pigeon.

“ _Passerella iliaca_ ; a fox sparrow. It will probably be flying north in a month or two.”

“Where you even keep this shit in your brain is— hey, what about that one?”

They kept up like that until the light was fading and they had to catch the train back to Los Angeles, followed by another awful setup of flights to get to Sydney. This time there were no sleep aids provided by well-meaning airline employees, and the jet-lag hangover was so bad they got a week’s vacation upon their return to keep them from blowing something up.

But when they did finally get back in their own lab, Newt would occasionally needle Hermann about useless Latin and rats with wings and not needing the opinion of a _birder_ on giant monsters from beyond. The other researchers assumed it was just another onion-like layer to their personal and professional hostility, and no one noticed the way it made Hermann’s mouth twitch in a carefully hidden smile, or that Newt sometimes would keep food that went bad so Hermann could feed the birds nesting on the Shatterdome roof.

 

\--

 

Back in the clearing, their little kaiju friend and Hermann are slowly getting acquainted while Newt stands by and tries not to feel like a nervous helicopter mom. A minute ago it head-butted Hermann’s chest just like it had done to Newt, but it’s not bumping into Hermann with as much force as it used before, and seems to be completely avoiding his bad leg in favor of poking its nose at his arms and torso. Almost like it _noticed_ , and cares enough not to hurt him.

“Huh,” Newt says aloud without meaning to.

Hermann turns his head anyway. “What?”

“Nothing. Just, I think it likes you better,” is all he says.

Hermann visibly preens (there’s really no other word for it) and goes back to petting that spot under the kaiju’s chin. “Then if nothing else, we know it has impeccable taste.”

Newt rolls his eyes, but supposes he kind of walked right into that one.

“Is there any way to tell if it’s male or female?”

“Nah. Well, not that I’ve figured out yet. There’s no obvious external physical markers that’d be analagous to anything on this planet. We’ve just been assigning gender to kaiju randomly, or not at all. We called Otachi female in reports because of Baby Otachi Junior, but it’s not like we can really be sure how their pregnancies work, you know? And the last one, Slattern—”

Hermann grimaces. “I don’t believe they should have called it that.”

“Well, you know. Bunch of military types all amped up for battle…” He tries for a ‘what-can-you-do’ sort of shrug, and can tell it falls flat by the annoyingly understanding look on Hermann’s face. Newt trails off and sighs, rubbing a hand through his hair. “Yeah, I didn’t like it either,” he admits.

It’s the sort of thing they’ll only ever say to each other, a sentiment still not entirely welcome in an aggressive paramilitary atmosphere, even in 2025. Or—not to put too fine a point on it, but—the sort of thing a ranger might’ve challenged, but not two scientists still widely considered so obnoxiously and single-mindedly intellectual as to practically be aliens themselves. Proving themselves to the fighting force had been an ongoing challenge, and you didn’t win points by quibbling over the name of some dead monster.

_especially when PPDC has been so welcoming so unexpectedly friendly in a great many ways such discoveries being made better than back home certainly better than Father’s shadow_

Newt sways on his feet, blinks back the flash of whatever that was and glances at Hermann to see if he’s noticed.

He has, of course.

“So,” Hermann says quickly and crisply, in one of his more obvious attempts to Not Talk About Feelings and Especially Not Drifting, Ever. “You were saying?”

“Yeah. Well, given they way they’re created by the Precursors, and all the genetic engineering that went along with it, I’d be willing to bet a large percentage of kaiju are so physically different as to be sexually incompatible, which also means that the attributes of one may be completely unhelpful in determining the sex of another. So even if I had every single kaiju to examine, which I don’t, I might still have to start from scratch with each one.”

“So you may not be able to find out,” Hermann says, just to needle him.

It’s true, but Newt still glares. “I’ll think of something! Or we could always…”

It’s a vague, pretty meaningless gesture he makes, but it must convey the basic concept of drifting because Hermann immediately blanches and snaps, “No. Absolutely not.”

“Yeah, okay, okay,” Newt sighs, reaching up to pet the kaiju’s scaly nose. “Don’t freak out. It was just an idea.”

 

\--

 

“You realize we’re going to have to tell Hansen.”

“Uh, yeah, Captain Positive, I’m aware of that, thanks.” Newt doesn’t look at him — he’s trying to see if the kaiju has ears he can find — and he doesn’t say he’s kind of scared shitless of telling Herc Hansen of all people that we found a live kaiju, oh but it’s a nice one, please can we keep it instead of gutting it on sight like it’s a pig and we’re all in _Lord of the Flies_? (He respects the PPDC, he does, at least most days, but seriously, there’s narrow-minded and then there’s grieving, wounded people who’ve set themselves up as Earth’s knights in shining armor.) 

“Newton,” Hermann says more quietly, and that does get Newt’s attention, gets him to duck around the bulk of the kaiju’s neck to catch sight of Hermann, who is watching him with unexpected gentleness. “It will be all right. Just try to be patient with him. You managed to convince me, after all.”

“Yeah, but you’ve—“ He stops, fairly certain the words are still forbidden.

“I have,” Hermann agrees. “And I suppose it’s left me more amenable to the idea of a kaiju lacking hostile intent, though that may simply be… more, ah—” He fixes his eyes on the ground, where he is digging the end of his cane into the sandy soil. “well — _your_ influence.”

He presses his lips into a thin line with what is definitely a blush spreading across his face, turning his ears an endearing shade of red, while Newt just sort of gapes. Newt has no idea if Hermann meant ‘ten years stuck with you and you’ve started infecting me with kaiju-loving cooties’ or ‘remember that time we mashed our brains together and now you love the smell of chalk and I’m apparently cool with this baby version of the alien beasts that have ravaged our planet’, but either way, _whoa_.

“Look, do you—” he starts to say, but the kaiju moves and interrupts him.

It lowers its heavy body almost like a camel would, bending the joints in one pair of legs, then the other, until its belly rests on the ground. Once it successfully completes this maneuver it lists slightly to the left, just enough to rest its side against Hermann, who stands there looking thoroughly speechless and just a tiny bit flattered.

“Oh my _god_ ,” Newt hisses, grabbing at his hair, because the sight is very close to causing him physical pain. “You can’t tell me that’s not adorable.”

“Groupie.” Hermann has leaned over to peer at the ridge along the kaiju’s spine, now just below eye-level, and is resting a hand on its side, and his tone is so absently, unexpectedly fond that Newt has to take a moment to allow the universe to realign itself and/or explode.

“Uh, so,” he tries when neither happens and the quiet starts to feel weird. “We go to Hansen?”

The sharp, not-quite-amused glance from Hermann lets him know that his use of the plural was not quite as subtle as he’d hoped. “Yes,” Hermann says anyway, nodding along with his words the way he sometimes does when he’s thinking. “Considering the marshal’s upcoming duties as the Shatterdome is dismantled, I believe sooner would be better than later.”

“All right.” Newt shifts on his feet, pets the kaiju’s head one last time and tries, unsuccessfully, to swallow down his nervousness. “Shall we?”

Hermann straightens up and nods again. “I suppose we shall. Lead on.”

“Sit, okay?” he tells the disgruntled, rumbling kaiju as they leave. “Just sit right there.”

“I doubt it knows how to sit, Newton.”

“Screw you, our baby’s a genius,” Newt replies, and then wonders, in the oppressive and immediate silence that follows, if it might not be kinder for Herc to just shoot him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FANART! This is not a drill. The fabulous iblurb / strawberry milano has created two amazing pieces of art, [here](http://strawberrymilano.tumblr.com/post/58163415615/httyk1) and [here](http://strawberrymilano.tumblr.com/post/58194694108/httyk2), which I find are best viewed while clutching my face with glee and screeching.
> 
> I've also been foolish enough to [post](http://psikeval.tumblr.com/post/58613399367/so-this-is-an-art-reference-i-made-for-myself-re) my original kaiju sketch, but let's just say there's a reason I write instead of drawing.

For his interim command as the shatterdome is dismantled, Marshal Hansen chose not to inherit Pentecost’s office or quarters. Instead, he is operating from a makeshift workspace primarily consisting of a desk and some chairs, just off the main room of LOCCENT. The location is convenient, if chaotic, with a lot of access to Tendo and his army of techs but not much in the way of walls or furniture.

As they approach, Newt wishes there was some kind of door to knock on, if only to delay this.

Hansen looks up from whatever he is slowly typing when they enter his peripheral vision. He doesn’t smile—never quite does, these days—but his face twitches in a way that is passably polite as he holds up a finger to stop them. “Afternoon, gentlemen. If you could just give me a moment.”

“Of course, sir,” says Hermann, but Hansen is already back to pecking at the keyboard and gives no sign of having heard.

Herc Hansen looks as if he’s aged twenty years since Chuck left the ’dome with Pentecost. He’s been handling his duties with the steadiness of an old soldier, and in his way he is as fixed in his authority as Pentecost ever was— but not like a touchstone or a monument. More like a tomb. A walking headstone, with the names and dates of his wife and son carved deep in the lines of his face, and it’s a hard thing to see without wanting to turn tail and run.

Honestly, Newt’s more nervous around him than he ever was with Pentecost. It feels, in a way he can’t quite pin down, like Hermann is on edge too, but before he can actually turn his head and check, Hansen shuts down the screen in front of him and gives them his full attention.

“This reminds me, Dr. Zhang was looking for you two,” he says. “Said you weren’t in the lab.”

“Well, we do go to other places,” Newt can’t help saying.

“Newton, please,” Hermann mutters before addressing Hansen. “Did she happen to indicate that the issue is time sensitive, or wh—”

“Seriously? You’re doing this now? Timing, Hermann, I want you to learn about—”

“You’re the one whose little problem took us away from—”

“News flash, buddy! I’m pretty sure my _little problem_ is more important than whatever’s—”

“Gentlemen!” Hansen snaps, stopping them both. “If you don’t mind, I’m a slight bit busy.”

“Right!” Newt holds his hands up apologetically. “Sorry, didn’t mean to waste your time, it’s just, uh. We found something. _I_ found something,” he corrects before Hermann can, “this morning, when I was out, and… I think you might wanna see it.”

Hansen watches him like he’s expecting something and Newt tries not to shift anxiously on his feet, because he’s going for attentive and polite but is getting the distinct impression that something else is wanted. Finally Hansen says, “Dr. Geiszler.”

“Yes!”

Hansen sighs almost inaudibly and rubs at his temple. “I’m going to need a little more to go on here. Now why don’t you sit down and tell me what you’ve found.”

As a rule, Newt is not one for sitting; he paces and stands and has been known to jump up and down on occasion, but usually only takes a seat when he’s bleeding or watching movies on his couch (and sometimes not even then). He sits in front of Hansen now in a rare show of cooperation, and tries not to feel too relieved when Hermann takes the chair next to him.

Still, he starts drumming the beat of a Megaherz song on his ankle, keeping double-time with his fingertips. Normally when he’s this nervous, stressed and excited, he stays away from people until he vomits or calms down. It’s a good system. It usually works. He does not want to throw up on his new commanding officer.

“Allrightsowhatwouldyousay,” he starts in a blur, and tells himself to slow down even before Hermann’s cane pokes his shoe. “Uh, sorry, I mean— what would your… reaction be, if I told you we’d found a… some evidence, that maybe the kaiju aren’t totally wiped off the face of the earth?”

The color drains too quickly from Hansen’s face. “What kind of evidence?”

“Not an actual kaiju!” Newt says hurriedly, and can feel judgment radiating from Hermann. “Not even a Category 1, just a little… tiny…” He holds his finger and thumb less than an inch apart. “…baby kaiju.”

“I’d say exterminate it.” The words are flat but there is something in Hansen’s eyes, horrified and horrible, a conviction Newt has been trying to grasp for years but just _can’t_ , and it’s hard not to feel like this is what he’s tried so hard to avoid, the sharpest edge of a divide that can never be dulled or removed—not the condescending clap of Raleigh Becket’s hand on his shoulder, but what flickered in his eyes when Newt said _awesome._

Newt sits very still and hopes his face is blank, despite the cold twisting in his gut. This is the moment to make his case and he’s got nothing, just a dry mouth and a racing pulse where a plan should be, and he cannot sit for another fucking second.

“Well,” he says brightly, smacking his hands on the arms of the chair as he stands, “then I guess it’s a good thing we haven’t found any—” 

“Newton.” Hermann’s hand around his wrist stops Newt dead, even if he doesn’t sit back down. He just stares down at Hermann, watches him wet his lips and steel himself for a fight, and thinks in a numb sort of way that he doesn’t know which is more attractive. “Marshall,” Hermann is saying, “I understand your feelings, truly. But for once, I urge you to listen to Dr. Geiszler. I’ve seen the creature, and as unbelievable as it may seem, I don’t think it means us any harm.”

Hansen’s expression doesn’t so much as flicker. “We’ll see. Lau!”

“Sir?”

“Get a team together, armed. We’re going for a ride.”

 

\--

 

The clearing, when they reach it, is empty.

Newt tries not to experience anything resembling panic. It was bad enough when they told Hansen that yes, they left the kaiju ‘unsecured,’ and he’d really only gotten out of that one by talking up how much it likes him and how it has a supply of food and is definitely, _definitely_ not going anywhere.

Being wrong really is the worst feeling in the world.

“Uh, baby?” he calls out, taking a few steps forward. “You there, buddy?”

There’s nothing, not even the tiniest rustling in the trees. All he can hear are the waves on the beach and the muttering of Hansen’s ‘team.’ He glances back at the others, which, as it happens, is not exactly the most encouraging place to look. Hermann has that look on his face, like he’s already run the whole equation in his head and really wishes _x_ equaled something more pleasant. And Hansen, well—he just looks angry.

Newt tries to pretend they aren’t there, and tries again. “Hello? You want to come out and meet some people? It’s me, remember?” On the plus side, he’s too busy trying not to hyperventilate to worry about how stupid this looks. When he still doesn’t see anything, Newt goes to take a step back, only to jolt when he realizes Hansen is now standing right behind him.

“I don’t suppose,” the marshal says in a deceptively light tone, “that it’s so ‘tiny’ we just can’t see it?”

He is so, so dead. “I’m thinking you wouldn’t buy that, sir.”

The huff of breath that escapes Hansen’s mouth has nothing in common with laughter. “So you’ve actually managed to _lose_ a kaiju somewhere in these woods?”

“I know it’s around here somewhere!” Newt says, which as responses go is so stupendously bad that even he can’t help cringing. “Shit. I mean—”

“How big is this thing?” Herc’s shoulders are squared, his spine straightened and he’s scanning all sides of the clearing, none of which bodes well for this not blowing up in their faces. As soon as this turns into a tactical situation, Newt will lose all semblance of influence over it. The kaiju will die.

“I—”

“How big?” Hansen snaps.

Newt throws up his hands. “Two meters at the shoulder, maybe three long, not counting the tail.”

“And it can kill someone?”

“Are you kidding me?!”

“ _Can it_ —”

“Yes, okay! Sure! And you don’t have to repeat yourself, I do in fact speak English, what I’m trying to say is it’s not going to hurt anyone, unless you run around trying to _shoot_ it, in which case—”

“That’s enough, Geiszler.”

“Can you just listen to me?! There’s no reason for it to—”

Hansen’s arm shoots forward, and Newt braces himself to be punched, or at least seized by the front of his jacket, but Herc grabs his tie instead, wrapping it once around his fist.

“I said that’s _enough_. I haven’t got the luxury of caring about your theories, Doctor. You think it’s not gonna hurt us, fine! But last I checked, it’s me who’s responsible for what happens if you’re wrong,” he growls, pulling hard enough on the tie that Newt coughs. Hermann, still a ways back with the others, takes a step forward and starts to raise his cane to interrupt, but Hansen ignores him. “I’m the one who’s got to consider _every damn person this thing could kill!_ ”

Which is, of course, when the kaiju arrives—and how.

It occurs to Newt that he underestimated how loudly it can roar when it wants to. And the size of its teeth, for that matter.

And how badly he’s screwed this up.

“Stop stop stop, Marshal, let me go _right now!_ ”

To his surprise, Hansen actually does. The second Newt stumbles back, the kaiju shoves him towards Hermann so forcefully that he goes rolling through the dirt, then places its entire body in front of them as a barricade, blocking them off from the others.

Some idiot fires a gun, which is deafening in addition to being absolutely useless. The kaiju shakes itself like the bullet was just an annoyance, and roars at them again..

Newt spits dirt and leaves out of his mouth and lets Hermann haul him up. “ _Wait!_ ” he yells over the ringing in his ears. “It is _not attacking you,_ look!”

This time, the kaiju actually backs him up on it. After digging into the ground with its talons and snarling like a rockslide for a few moments longer, it slowly circles Newt and Hermann and settles into a crouch with its tail still curved around them, facing Hansen and his team.

Everyone in the clearing stands perfectly still, too stunned to speak. Newt realizes that Hermann is still clutching his arm.

Hansen, who’s gone so pale he looks like he might fall down, is nevertheless the first to recover.

“Explain what’s going on,” he says. “Immediately.”

 

\--

 

“Was it absolutely necessary,” Hermann grumbles into his soup, “to refer to us as its parents?”

Hermann’s complaining tends to set him off at the best of times, and after the emotional highs and lows of the last twelve hours, Newt feels like he might actually burst into flames, but he grits his teeth, counts to six, and tries to behave. “Yes, okay? It was. For one thing, I needed to stake my claim as mommy.”

“Not the father?”

“No, I think my feelings are best described as maternal. You’re the dad.”

“I don’t see why I have to be any relation at all,” Hermann huffs, as if he didn’t quietly insist that the kaiju at least be kept in a storage bay with food, natural light and not too much noise.

“Well, it was also easier than mentioning the drift, all right? Because in case you didn’t notice, they had guns _pointed at me_ , and somehow I don’t think they’d’ve gone for the mental-bonding-with-kaiju angle.”

“Hansen was a jaeger pilot. He would have understood.”

“Really, you think?” Newt laughs, quick and sharp. “Because _I_ think he can understand sticking his brain inside a giant metal killing machine, but comes up a little short on anything else.”

“You know that’s hardly fair, Newton.”

“And keeping Baby locked up in a holding cell is?”

“Baby,” Hermann repeats so skeptically than Newt can’t suppress a weak smile.

“Yeah. And nobody puts Baby in the holding cell.” 

“Trust me when I tell you that I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Imagine my total shock.” Newt digs his fingertips into his scalp and tries to feel a little less totally fucking drained. Then, before he can think better of it, he reaches over and taps the back of Hermann’s hand. “But hey, thanks for sticking up for me, before. Didn’t see that one coming.”

“Well.” Hermann’s mouth tilts into a half-smile. “You’re not always completely wrong.”

“Could I get that in writing?”

“But you are wrong when it comes to Marshal Hansen.”

“Oh, come on,” he groans, leaning back in his seat like if he’s a few inches further from Hermann he can somehow escape the Conversation Zone. “Will you please just drop it?

Hermann sets his jaw and glares. “No, Newton, I will not _drop it_. If you want to keep that kaiju alive, you’re going to have to cooperate and you’ll need to have patience, neither of which are your particular strengths. You can’t expect Hansen of all people to defer to your judgment simply because you demand it. Like it or not, he has a valid reason to want any kaiju dead.” 

“Shut up,” Newt snaps. “Jesus, a _valid_ reason, are you kidding me? Say he’s got a personal bias and fine, okay, you got me, but their _valid reason_ boils down to a shit-ton of reductive magical thinking, they want to believe in the big bad wolf so they can be the heroes, a—”

“Will you grow up!” Hermann slams his hand on the table between them and the last diners lingering nearby take their trays and scurry off. “I have literally no idea how it’s escaped you all these years, but we aren’t living in your perfect fantasy world, and when people see their planet devastated and their loved ones ripped away by enormous creatures from beyond, _yes_ , they tend to generalize!”

“Demonize, you mean.”

“Oh, for the love of god, Newton.” Arguments aside, Hermann looks like he’s about to have an aneurysm, and to his own horror Newt can’t help feeling a little guilty about that.

“Look,” he tries, “I get that Hansen just lost his kid. All I want is for him to _listen_.”

“Then approach the man on his own terms, and don’t treat him like an imbecile! The years of research have reinforced all your bad habits. Try to remember what it was like to teach—because from what I’ve heard, you were exceptional.”

“I,” Newt stalls out on that first syllable, starts over. “Somehow you’ve turned this into a compliment, and I want you to know I resent it.”

“Of course you do,” Hermann sighs. “Now eat your dinner.”

 

\--

 

They stop at Hermann’s door, after leaving the dining hall, and just sort of look at each other, both at a loss for how to end the sort of day they’ve had.

“I’m gonna…” Newt points his thumb over his shoulder at nothing in particular.

“Go to your quarters and stay out of trouble?”

“Y–es. Definitely.”

Hermann stares at him, unimpressed, and makes the martyr face he uses to let the world know that no one has ever suffered as he, Hermann Gottlieb, is made to suffer. “Come in, then.”

After a brief internal dialogue, mostly consisting of ‘ _well obviously he doesn’t mean it like that_ ’ and ‘ _right, because that would be_ —’ and then a great mental chasm where an adjective belongs, Newt gets his shit together enough to follow Hermann into his quarters.

It feels weirdly like… home.

Not physically, of course. There’s a battered copy of _Principia Mathematica_ lying like a bible on the bedside table, and what looks like an original design sketch of Brawler Yukon framed on the wall; otherwise, the room is just as empty and neat as he’s always imagined Hermann’s living space would be. He has to admit it works, though, in a small space like this. All the stuff Newt brought from his apartment in Sydney has been quietly devouring his quarters.

“This is nice,” Newt says aloud, maybe just for the startled, pleased look on Hermann’s face. “You should see mine— total chaos. I’m not completely sure I even have a floor.”

Despite being served a golden opportunity to insult Newt’s living habits, Hermann just blinks at him, says “Ah. Yes,” in an odd tone of voice and turns away. “It’s somewhere in here,” he mutters, sticking his head into the closet space and rummaging around.

Newt traces the tattooed lines on his wrist out of habit. He picks up _Principia Mathematica_ and finds a bookmark two-thirds in. He briefly considers lying on Hermann’s bed to be annoying but rejects the idea out of hand, mostly because he actually wants to and that in itself is disturbing. Right?

“Ah,” Hermann says abruptly. “Here.”

He turns around with something large and puffy in his arms. It looks, at first glance, a lot like his big ugly parka. “If you’re going to act like a child, you can at least not catch your death on the floor,” he says without meeting Newt’s eyes.

“I kinda doubt floors are as dangerous as you think,” Newt replies before it hits him that Hermann is enabling without so much as an argument, and should really probably be hugged for that.

He takes the sleeping bag and wraps both arms around it instead.

“Thanks, man.”

“Certainly. I suppose I’ll see you in the morning.”

“I’ll tell the baby you said hi, yeah?”

Hermann’s mouth twitches at the corners when he says “Good night, Newton.”

 

\--

 

The kaiju’s makeshift holding cell was once the storage and repair room for the mechanical skull of Crimson Typhoon. After that incident with the eco-terrorists (who Newt had agreed with in principle, but hated in reality) any disassembled jaeger parts were kept under much heavier security, meaning that they’d had more than one locked and bolted room to choose from when it came to keeping their little kaiju prisoner.

All things considered, bringing it back to the shatterdome could have been much, much worse. Once the kaiju got an idea of what Newt wanted, it followed them pretty willingly, although it always kept itself between Hermann and Newt and the rest of the group. It even came inside—after a few people were sent in to clear the path of people—and went into the storage room, with Newt walking ahead and offering encouragement.

It was when they had to leave and close the door that things went south. Their ‘baby’ had slammed repeatedly into the door and walls, shaking the whole area, and produced a roar with this high, plaintive note that made Newt feel like the most terrible person in the world.

He is really, really hoping he’s been forgiven by now.

When he walks in, he doesn’t even see the kaiju at first. It’s crouched in the farthest, darkest corner of the storage bay, knawing on the remains of what was probably a dolphin—which, admittedly, is pretty grotesque, even when Newt knows it was dead already. It’s the bone-crunching sound, he tells himself. Nobody likes the bone-crunching sound.

“Hey, little guy,” he calls, standing still and speaking slowly just in case. “How you doing in here?”

The kaiju’s head jerks up and it drops its meal almost immediately in favor of scrambling to its feet and practically trotting over to Newt. It head-butts into his chest again and stays there, leaning forward enough that the ridge on its head digs uncomfortably into Newt’s sternum. He’s starting to think that’s an instinctive behavior, developed to get attention and affection from adults, and not just incredibly fucking cute.

“Secure attachment, I’m calling it right now,” he says, hugging the kaiju’s blood-smeared head. “Sad when mommy leaves, goes and plays with dead things, then runs back to mommy when he returns.”

The kaiju shakes its head, and Newt with it, in as polite a request to stop holding its jaw shut as he’s likely to get.

Wisely, Newt steps back.

“Are you tired?” He takes off his shoes, belt and tie, hesitates momentarily and then goes for the pants too. He sucks at sleeping in pants. “I’m kind of hoping you’re tired, buddy, ’cause I’m about three steps from dead.” While the kaiju noses—and, he hopes, decides not to eat—his clothes, Newt rolls out the sleeping bag and flops right onto it, face down.

“Ohhh, man,” he groans. “Hermann, I owe you.”

A few moments later, the kaiju sets itself down next to him and rests its chin on the ground with a dull thud. Newt reaches out and pets its side, already half asleep.

He really, really hopes this isn’t a dream.

 

\--

 

There are spaces designed to be empty near the northwest corner of the shatterdome, left for visitors, extra staff quarters or additional storage as needed. One of these rooms is currently serving as a makeshift office for Ashenafi Nebiyu, original architect of the world’s eight shatterdomes, who is visiting them in Hong Kong to oversee the dismantling and restructuring of the building.

The unique thing about the ’domes is that they were built to be recycled—specifically, made into cheap, easily assembled housing complexes in the disaster areas inevitably surrounding every shatterdome. The fortress-like command centers can stand against almost any outside onslaught, but are constructed to be taken apart easily from within. Just about everything can be repurposed with minimal alteration—metal, glass, wiring, even plumbing. It’s something not many people knew or cared to ask about, but the concept got Ashenafi hired on the spot.

“Doctor Geiszler, ¿como estas?” he calls before Newt has even entered the office.

“No way,” he replies, grabbing a chocolate from the bowl on Ashenafi’s desk before he sits down. “You can’t learn another language, you make me look bad enough already.”

Ashenafi just laughs unrepentantly. “I got a colleague in South America trying to teach me, he says oh, you know, it will be helpful, but I said don’t hold your breath. I’m getting too old for new words.”

The PPDC’s head architect is a tall, thin man in a sharp linen suit, with quick hands and slowly greying hair. He speaks English, his fourth language, with a lilting jumble of accents that suggest he learned it piecemeal over the years, from speakers of Amharic, Arabic and French. It makes Newt aware of his flat American accent like nothing else.

“Bullshit,” he says with his mouth full. “You’re like a sponge.”

“In a good way, I hope,” says Ashenafi, laughing again.

“Oh, yeah, totally. Did you know there are siliceous sponges—way too basic to compare to the kaiju, but I studied them anyway, just in case. Hundred percent boring, would not recommend. This was years ago, in Sydney, back when I didn’t have any actual kaiju samples to work with.”

Having met Newt several times before, Ashenafi knows to ignore most of this, but he does tilt his head and say, “Rumor has it you got more than just a sample now.”

At that point Newt really can’t help grinning, because he woke up on a metal floor, bruised but toasty warm in Hermann’s sleeping bag, with his back aching and a kaiju staring down at his face and it is the _coolest thing ever_. “I do, yeah! You should come visit, I can introduce you. It’s really a total sweetheart, unless you happen to be seafood.”

“I think I’ll take your word for it,” Ashenafi says easily, “but thank you.”

“All right, fine. Will that be a problem when we move? ’Cause we’re taking Baby with us, no question—and that is not its name, by the way, I’m gonna come up with something much better.”

“Ah. Well, as a matter of fact, it could be just fine. The new site…” He makes a vague, apologetic gesture. “I’m not at liberty to say, with nothing final, and besides I don’t want you disappointed. But if the deal goes through, I don’t think you’ll need to worry.”

“Cryptic. I like it.”

“Glad to hear it. But I am afraid we have another problem.” Ashenafi turns in his chair and grabs a sheet of drafting paper from the stack lying on a table behind him. He sets it down on the desk between them. “These are the fourth-floor plans of our new K-Science building.”

“Which is, what, mostly guest rooms, right?”

“Yes.” 

It looks fine to Newt—not that he knows anything about buildings, but it appears to have windows and walls and an acceptable number of toilets, which is about as much as he’s qualified to consider. He has to stare a little more before it hits him. “Where’s the elevator?”

“Exactly. I had a draftsman take over the details while I was in Peru, and when I was delayed he requested incorrect amounts of materials, based on this error in the plan. Doctor Gottlieb, of course, tells me not to trouble myself. But you will say—”

“Damn right I’ll say!” Newt interrupts, tossing his chocolate wrapper at Ashenafi, who catches it easily. “If there is a single closet he can’t get into, I’m suing your ass.”

“And you would.” He feigns a loud sigh. “Too much time living in America.”

“But really, you can do it, right?” 

“Of course, of course. It’s not a matter of recycling the ’dome, most of that is going elsewhere. Takes more than old parts to make a LEED Platinum building, and I’m going to be stubborn about that.”

“And we love you for it, trust me. I should probably head out, but you want to to join us for dinner tonight? They’re making pumpernickel bread, me and Hermann are gonna hoard like five loaves.”

“Hard to resist,” Ashenafi says, deadpan, “but there is no way. Not when my wife and I are finally in the same country. I don’t even know why I am talking to you now.”

“Hey, awesome! How is she?”

“Perfect in every way,” he answers promptly, with way too dreamy a look in his eyes for someone edging close to fifty. “I’m only afraid of when we’re living together for good and she realizes I am a disaster of a man who still can’t make his own coffee.”

“Uh, yeah, I’m playing the world’s smallest violin for you.”

In a rare instance of stooping to Newt’s level, Ashenafi throws the wrapper back at him, smiling broadly. “And when are you going to settle down? I’m always telling Faiza—”

“Seriously,” Newt complains around another mouthful of chocolate. “You guys are like the busybody parents I never had. I’ve been living in a lab for ten years straight, I don’t know how you expect me to find someone.”

Newt isn’t accustomed to being frowned at like he’s said something incredibly dense, but it’s the look he always gets when they have this conversation, and he still doesn’t know why. (Seriously, he’d like to see somebody else do his job and have free time for _sleeping_ , let alone dating.) “All right,” Ashenafi sighs, waving him off, “take a chocolate for Hermann and go; I still need to work for my living.”

“Thanks, but he only likes the 99% dark crap,” Newt says and wonders, as he leaves, why Ashenafi is putting a hand over his face.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More incredible [fanart](http://soppixo.tumblr.com/post/58671344814/how-to-train-your-kaiju-like-a-baby-godzilla) by the wonderful & talented soppixo!

Newt would say he’s not completely clueless when it comes to how he feels about Hermann.

He is, at least, aware of the question, if not the actual answer. He can grasp the premise for which he still lacks a hypothesis, and he accepts that the problem is way more personal than experimental, even if “double blind” _does_ feel like a fantastic phrase to describe it all.

When he first met Hermann it was so much simpler. Newt saw him and took in the unflattering clothes, the ridiculous haircut and the god-why-would-you glasses, and he just wondered who the hell would fall for that—who could ever fix their attention on those details instead of seeing the man they concealed. (Almost everyone, it turns out. People are morons.) He saw Hermann, and he thought _yes._

_Yes, please._

Of course, their introduction quickly turned into their first argument, followed by their very first full-blown fight, with Newt resorting to tactics he hadn’t used since he was eleven years old and starting high school, up to and including the use of animal noises, Imitation Talking Hands, and godawful butchery of a posh British accent. He was riding high and half-wild on adrenaline, didn’t know if the catch in his throat was nerves or hurt or laughter but as long as he spat it out before it started making sense, he figured it really didn’t matter.

Then Hermann went and called him an obnoxious brat in _German,_ which, in Newt’s opinion, was just completely uncalled for. The playing field changed the second he choked and sputtered _Willst du mich verdammt nochmal auf den Arm nehmen?_ —he could see in the way Hermann’s spine straightened, the bright spark of shock and resentment in his eyes. Newt, of course, went on to dredge up every single obscenity Uncle Gunter ever made him swear not to say in front of his mother, spurred by Hermann turning a really excellent shade of red. Everyone else in the room moved swiftly away, taking breakables with them, except for the one German intern, Constanze, who’d clapped a hand over her mouth but appeared to be taking notes.

Long story short, Marshal Sarah Mundine came back and forcibly dragged him away from Hermann, and Newt walked out of the room with a fucking _massive_ crush on the guy. 

That died out, for the most part, after a while. Persistence was one thing and (after maybe the fourth year) he figured insanity was another. He wasn’t going to just— wait around, or whatever, for some annoying, uptight dude who didn’t seem to want anything to do with him. Bug the hell out of Hermann every chance he got? Sure. But Newt does have _some_ limits. Or at least, he’s got his pride.

The thing about Hermann is that he has this ability to look down his nose and make Newt feel like a loud, annoying, overgrown kid instead of a world-renowned biologist with six doctorates to his name—and the thing about Newt is that he can’t help acting the part. He has, believe it or not, had colleagues with whom he was boisterous but not grating, opinionated but still professional, practically _subdued_. Colleagues whose theories he debated by more sophisticated means than shouting off-color limericks every time they tried to speak.

Needless to say, Hermann has never been, and never will be, among those colleagues, no matter how well Newt behaves. Hermann gets under his skin, makes him snippy and defensive and sharper, somehow, picks apart all Newt’s best ideas until Newt is too pissed off to realize his hypotheses have been harangued into solid, workable theories. They just might be the scientific team of the century, and no one’s more bitter about it than they are.

Except, well. There’s always been more to it than that, hasn’t there? They wouldn’t have lasted ten years if they didn’t attract at least as much as they repel each other, and Newt knows, deep down, there’s a solid layer of something very like affection. Hermann is prim, impatient, brilliant, unfuckingbelievably stubborn; irresistible in the way of a banned book or a bad word and annoying as hell and just maybe the best friend Newt’s ever had. He likes _birds,_ for god’s sake.

And he thought— _they_ thought—when they Drifted, it seemed like—it’s hard to parse out, all right, jumping in heads-first with no training, but—it’s almost certainly something. Frustration, wariness, teacups, walking a labyrinth. Whatever it means.

Newt can’t be sure. He rests secure in the thought that even if he doesn’t know, he knows what he doesn’t know and knows he _should_ know, which, as knowledge goes, is not an insubstantial feat.

It works for him, for now.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, you beautiful people! I know this is probably not the update you were hoping for (assuming, rather brazenly, that some among you still held out hope), but I woke up this morning and actually started writing this fic again for the first time in months, so I thought I'd celebrate by sharing the next completed bit. Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart, for being so kind, enthusiastic and patient, and I hope to have more for you soon! <3


	4. Chapter 4

The following week is weirdly uneventful, really, considering the newest addition to the Shatterdome’s population. Newt’s undying excitement over having the baby kaiju wars loudly with his guilt over keeping it penned up, and he tries to spend as much time in the holding bay as he can, bringing dead fish and Hermann and scrap metal chew toys as peace offerings. At one point he even drags in his speakers, in an effort to determine Baby’s taste in music, and derives great joy from the look on Hermann’s face when their little kaiju bellows angrily over every note of Wagner.

(Hermann doesn’t  _want_  to be standing around in filth without half their proper equipment, babysitting a monster, he explains to Newt at least once an hour. He’s only concerned about the sort of influence Newt will have on the creature if left to his own devices, and  _will you turn off that ridiculous noise? or at least skip to the fourth track, which as I recall is less painful_.)

In a way—a way they both carefully refuse to mention—it’s good that to have something to keep them a way from the lab as it’s dismantled, bits of the last ten years of their lives packed away and sealed. Newt had walked in a couple days ago, found the moving crews at work and Hermann standing there with his tea, staring silently at the spot where the specimen tanks had been like he was watching a field doctor amputate a limb.

That had been the first time Newt dragged him out and made him spend the day downstairs discussing predictive statistics and being forcefully cuddled by Baby. Now it’s more or less become the routine, and Newt hasn’t slept in his quarters sincer their little kaiju got here.

Then on Thursday, a diving team clearing up the far-flung wreckage of Cherno Alpha and Crimson Typhoon discovers the eggs. 

It’s a huge cluster of little globes, like a cross between a frog’s eggs and the structure of a beehive—or it was, they’re pretty sure, before it was crushed by an impact from something big. The team takes pictures of the whole thing where it sits underwater, and then it’s brought to Newt.

It is a thousand times better than Christmas.

The first order of business is accounting for at least a trace of remains in every squashed, gelatinous egg, to make sure there aren’t any other kaiju babies running loose and undiscovered. Though there’s not much left in most cases, due to impact damage, natural degradation and extremely rude sea life eating his precious specimens, Newt is able to send off good news to Hansen within the hour. Only two embryos are close to intact, but all appear to have been destroyed before they could mature into viable offspring.

There is one empty egg, pried open from the inside and completely clean within. In the pictures taken by the diving team, it was lodged under a rock, not quite detached from the others but sheltered enough to be protected from whatever crashed into the cluster and killed them off.

“You,” he says when he brings the kaiju more food that afternoon, “are one lucky Baby.”

Then it’s back to the lab, after apologizing profusely and explaining (more for his own benefit, if he’s honest) that things will be better when they relocate and have more wide open spaces, so they just have to be patient. Newt tries not to worry, while scrubbing down his hands and his dissecting tools, about what might happen to the kaiju if he’s wrong.

No sense freaking out, he tells himself firmly. Not when there are specimens to be had.

He knows that very soon he’ll be packing all of this away with the rest, and most of these precious samples will be studied somewhere very different, once Ashenafi gets around to telling them where they’re going. It’s a little less than practical to be getting started now, but as Newt has explained a dozen times while shelling out money for tattoos, there is practical and then there are  _kaiju_.

“Think about it,” he says that night, as he scrubs at the blackish-purple gunk under his fingernails for the third time in twenty minutes. “Everything on earth, every single thing, we see within a frame of reference. History, biology, physics, you name it, they all add up to an understanding of the world, and that gives us implicit assumptions about how to look at new things.”

“Yes, well done. You’ve essentially just described schema theory.”

“Hey, hey, no interrupting!” Newt flicks water at Hermann just to see him scowl. “What I’m  _saying_ is, from what we can tell the kaiju are coming from a totally different kind of place, maybe even a whole other universe, and that changes everything. Don’t make that face, all right, just let me finish. Trying to figure out anything useful when all I’ve got is damaged samples of one organism is… I don’t know, like trying to map the human genome when all you’ve got’s a jellyfish, and it’s a lot, okay? It’s gonna be really fucking difficult.” 

“But you can do it?” Hermann asks, eyebrow raised, and Newt could really, really kiss him.

“Oh yeah,” he says instead, grinning and shoving up his sleeves for effect. “Just watch me.”

 

\--

 

On Saturday, Dr. Zhang Xinmei finally gets in touch with Newt and asks if he has time to tell her about his experiences drifting with kaiju. She’s the head of the pons technology research division, and she explains that she tried to get around to it earlier, but they’ve been busy conducting exit interviews with all the departing and retired pilots.

“We were video conferencing at all hours of the day, it was a nightmare,” she tells him, waving at Hermann as both greeting and invitation to include himself in the conversation. (Newt has always liked her for that.) “And we had to get live translators in on it, which was even worse, not to mention hunting down all the surviving retirees before the PPDC loses their contact info.”

It occurs to Newt then that Mako and Raleigh left the ’dome three days ago, that Tendo had tucked a note into the daily memo about a farewell party or something, and he’d completely forgotten. It’s not that he really wanted to go—or that, in his heart of hearts, he cares much at all about Becket, though Mako was always at least nice to him and Hermann.

It’s just weird, is all, to think that after everything, they can just pick up and leave, scatter back across the world like what they did was just a job and not their entire world. Like they can go back to real lives and real beds and real fucking coffee and never once jump out of bed full of panic, sure they just heard the warning klaxon,  _something in the breach_. Newt wonders if Mako and Raleigh left together or separately, without quite knowing why it would matter.

“Huh,” he finally says, closing the inventory files he’s been updating in an attempt to keep tabs on the move-out. “What’s the retirement plan for jaeger pilots, even?”

Xinmei raises her eyebrows. “Liquor, as far as I can tell.”

“Ah.” He winces and shuts down the screen. “So you didn’t interview any of them before?”

“Are you kidding me? We’ve been flying by the seat of our pants with this technology, just hoping that we don’t get anyone killed or hopelessly brain-damaged. Especially when we lost funding, all our time went into trying to make the Drift as safe as possible, finding ways to predict compatibility and keep pilot-pairing mistakes to a minimum. Retrospective analysis wasn’t exactly a priority.”

“Yeah, I get that. So is this your last stop?”

“ _Yes_ ,” she says like the word is a lifeline. “Thank god. I never thought sitting at my desk taking notes and doing data-cleaning would sound like a damn vacation.”

“Right, so, uh. Should we get this show on the road?”

“Actually. Before we get started, I wondered if I could take a look at the device you made?”

“Yeah, yeah, help yourself.” Newt gestures over to the pile he’d marked ‘DON’T TOUCH’ for the moving crew, then spends the next minute or so making faces at Hermann to convey the idea of _see, someone cares about my brilliant improvised work_  while Dr. Zhang sorts through the tangled cords and Hermann gives him a disgusted look that probably means  _must you? there are genuine narcissists less self-obsessed than you are, for god’s sake_.

“Well, shit,” Xinmei says dryly a few minutes later, both hands buried in the mess of wires springing from his cobbled-together device. “I’m no tech expert, but I’d say it’s a miracle you’re not dead.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Hermann grumbles.

She shoots him a bright, conspiratorial grin. Xinmei is in her forties and still hopelessly pretty, with striking dark eyes and long hair she keeps in a neat braid when she’s working. Newt occasionally entertains the idea that she and Hermann will get together (because they eat breakfast together sometimes and they have the same weird sense of humor and Hermann talks about her research annotation system like it’s almost as good as  _math_  and she listens to Hermann without making fun of him and they’d probably be perfect, right?) until he convinces himself that they’re on the verge of making beautiful genius babies and starts to feel kind of sick.

“Well, it worked,” Newt says. It comes out sounding a lot more defensive than he’d like.

She nods, her eyes back on the tangled cords between makeshift caps. “That it did. Twice, even, and it still doesn’t look burnt out, which is impressive. But med-recs say it took a bit of a toll, even with the neural load split between you. Hermann filled me in on the second Drift, but I’d like to get your account and hear what happened when you tried it alone.”

“Uh, yeah.” Newt holds up a finger. “Just a second— you mind if we do this here?” he asks Hermann. “It’s not like I have an office or anything. Besides, this way you can correct me while I’m talking and I know how much you love that.”

“As you like,” Hermann tells him absently, hands flying between touchscreen and keyboard, while Xinmei grabs an empty chair by the lab table.

She places a tablet on her lap and cues up a blank data entry form. “Okay, first off: on behalf of the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps, I would like to thank you for agreeing to participate in this interview, which we believe will be immensely helpful to future research on Drift technology. By speaking with me today, you are consenting to the use of information gained in this interview by myself and other qualified parties. The data, by its nature, cannot be anonymous. However, should you wish to expunge from the record a part or parts of what you say here, or the interview in its entirety, you may do so at any time without jeopardizing your relationship with PPDC or any affiliated organizations or individuals. Do you have any questions at this time?”

“…You’ve got that memorized?”

“Are you kidding? At this point I’ve literally said it in my sleep.”

“Wow.”

“So, unless there’s anything else—?”

“Yeah, no, go ahead.”

The questions, overall, are pretty basic—immediate and delayed psychological reactions, recovery time, physiological damage, post-Drift need for closeness (he fidgets through admitting it had been almost twenty-four hours before he let Hermann out of his sight, feels marginally better when she mentions off-hand that the average is thirty point eight).

“Have you, or others around you, noticed significant variance in your temperament?”

“Well, I’m guessing you’ve got access to my psych file? Same old, really.”

“Any odd cravings, changes in personal tastes, that sort of thing?”

“Little bit, yeah. More into tea. Nothing major, though.”

“Have you found yourself experiencing any bleed-through of thoughts or memories?”

Newt has been wondering about that himself. He’s got memories from the Drift, sure, and little bits of himself and Hermann that’ll pop up into his consciousness without warning, but bleed-through is more than that, more like a radio that won’t quite stop receiving. You’d think it would be easy to notice traces of a lingering telepathic link but as it turns out, well.

“Uh, some? but it’s hard to tell. I mean,” he forces a chuckle, bites at his thumbnail, feels the flush creeping up his neck and hopes to god the tattoo is hiding it, “he’s been my best friend for— like, years. I already know what he’s thinking half the time.” 

The silence from the other side of the lab feels dense enough to choke on, and Newt isn’t sure he could turn his head to look even if he wanted to, which—no, he categorically  _does not_.

Xinmei just makes a note with a smile Newt can’t begin to interpret.

“Anything longer than ten seconds, or vivid enough to cause disorientation?”

“No, definitely nothing like that.”

“All right. This next question isn’t standard, since no other team has Drifted while connected to a living creature. And I know you’ve never been connected to a jaeger, so it wouldn’t be fair to ask for a comparison, but really, any statement you could make about the experience. I’d like to know more about how that was for you, if you don’t mind.”

Newt shifts a little on his feet, thinking. The desire to brag is warring loudly with the need to provide data that's as precise and accurate as possible, and he figures if he can't manage to do both he is seriously off his game. “Well,” he begins, “the first time I was on my own, because  _somebody_  didn’t believe me—”

“Nobody believed you,” Hermann and Xinmei say in unison, because they are just too precious.

“Yeah, thanks, guys, thanks for the reminder. You’re really contributing a lot here.  _Anyway_ , the first time was more disjointed images, impressions—to be expected, you know, when you’ve only got a piece of dead kaiju brain. And the second time, the kaiju was dead, so there was a—a presence, I guess, and a link to the others, but we didn’t really get the full three-sentient-beings Drift experience. We could learn a lot more  _now_ ,” he adds loudly, the familiar shield of being an annoying little shit finally giving him the courage to look over his shoulder, “if we—” 

“Absolutely not,” Hermann snaps, jabbing a finger at Newt without even bothering to turn his head.

From Dr. Zhang there is only a small, tight smirk and the artificial tapping sound of her touch-screen keyboard, the sort of thing Newt disables within a minute of booting up a device. She saves and shuts down the file without pursuing his reference to the kaiju downstairs, and Newt isn’t stupid enough to push it—he’s not sure exactly how many family members and friends Xinmei has lost in the past decade, but he knows she’s had to move three times in total, and that it was years, not weeks or months, before she would speak to him at all. 

Some things, he’s learned, just aren’t worth risking.

“I think Hermann has described the link in the second Drift sufficiently,” Xinmei says, polite but firm. “I don’t want to waste your time. Before I go, if you could sign here?”

She hands him a stylus and the tablet with a written version of the consent form she recited earlier, and Newt scrawls his name across the line at the bottom and hands it back. “All right, cool. Good luck with the research, let me know if you need anything else.”

“I will. Have a good evening, Newt. Hermann,” she adds over his shoulder, and Hermann must wave or something because her smile widens a little before she turns to leave.

“Well,” Newt says once he and Hermann are alone again. “That wasn’t too painful, huh?” He doesn’t quite have the nerve to look at Hermann as he speaks, but when there’s no answer he gives himself a little mental shake, draws up the old bravado and walks over to Hermann’s side of the room—the line’s been stripped away, but they remember their old boundaries. Newt scoots in too close next to Hermann by the main computer, leaning against him in the annoying but stealthy way he devised that actually supports more of Hermann’s weight than his own. “Whatcha working on?”

“No doubt the complexities would escape you.”

Hermann’s tone is dry and unwelcoming, but he’s warm against Newt’s side and hasn’t even tried to move away, which gives Newt the nerve to sneak his arm behind Hermann’s back and say “Yeah? Try me.”

 

\--

 

Newt knows this is a bad idea. It was terrible before, and it’s not much better now; added precaution of a dampening agent to the neural connection aside, he’s still very much taking his life into his hands here.

At the very least, he should put it off. It’s not like he hasn’t been making any progress; he’s learned a shit-ton from the eggs and the embryos inside, or at least he’s got a lot more in the way of half-decent theories than he did a week ago. (Case in point: he’s 90% convinced that this particular kaiju type, if not necessarily kaiju in general, are a simultaneously hermaphroditic species, and that, to quote the words he scrawled in chalk across a clipboard when the computer was too far away, some ‘ _weird shit happens_ ’ to get the eggs fertilized and cue their initial growth under the adult specimen’s armor plates. After that, as he explained to a dumbstruck and tilting Hermann at 4:30 a.m., the kaiju have got to excrete something that makes the egg cluster when they get too big to carry around.) 

The point here is that Newt should not be doing this. And yet here he is, with Baby smuggled up into the lab past midnight, edging closer with a modified version of the pons device in his hands and letting the kaiju inspect it.

It’s entirely possible that K-Science will be moved out of the ’dome in as little as two weeks. They’ve finally got the relocation spot approved — or at least, Newt assumes that’s what happened. He got a message from Ashenafi yesterday that was mostly chatspeak and exclamation marks, because the PPDC’s head architect types like a preteen when he’s excited and it will never not be hilarious. Presumably, more details are to come.

There’s no rush. There’s no guarantee this is safe. There is, in short, absolutely no good reason to be trying the Drift again in the dead of night, and yet.  _And yet._

The kaiju nudges Newt’s arms and lets him place the helmet gingerly around its head, and it feels like a sign.

“Hermann’s gonna kill me,” he says aloud, feeling pretty resigned to the fact at this point.

He bites his lip, flicks the switch and the first thing he feels—

— _is **joy**.  _

_the way it was supposed to be, so quiet for so long so empty and alone **hello**_

Newt feels his nose start to bleed with the force of it.

 _hello I knew you were different, we remember you –_ he can’t control the drift, can’t speak the way it can, mind to mind –  _he is nineteen and teaching his first class on evolution so nervous his voice keeps squeaking and he compensates by being an insufferable fucking know-it-all_  

The kaiju seizes on the colors in his memory, red shirt blue wall ugly greenish-speckled carpet, draws them out until they burn—

_the meeting on the beach, with himself now through the kaiju’s eyes like double vision flaring up in colors he can’t see, one of the two tiny creatures who Joined, whose strange lonely minds had dared reach out; the thrill of recognition in the kaiju’s mind marred by the fear of the deadly machines_

— finds and discards his regrets about its treatment like so much dull scrap paper,  _alone is alone in the dark or the light, we were waiting for you **I** was waiting and the bridge is gone, I’m alone but here at least they cannot hurt us _and the memory, passed down, of the punishment doled out for disobedience. Newt shudders violently and crashes into something that hurts before he rights himself —

_piecing together engines, dissecting organs, shredded bits spread across tables and feeling most himself in the guts of something else, **odd** , he is twenty-eight and getting his tattoo, seventeen in a car on a date that makes his palm sweat and his throat seize up_

(lemon air freshener, magnified a million times, and it’s possible he’s thrown up on the floor of the lab, his hands are tingling almost painfully at his sides)

— the kaiju rifles through the questions in his mind, curious but not exactly interested —

_his mother on the shoreline right where water meets the sand, a too-cold breeze whipping her dress around her legs and she is smiling this time, hands out and head tilted back, bright and invincible – like he always hoped –_

— decides just as the door slams open, and before he collapses into Hermann’s arms Newt tells him “ _It’s a girl._ ”

 

\--

 

“This,” Hermann hisses as he checks Newt’s eyes and ears, “is the stupidest thing you have ever done, though it comes in a long line of absolute  _idiocy._ ” He wraps his entire hand around Newt’s throat to take his pulse, and there’s just no way that’s unintentional. “What were you  _thinking_?” 

“You. Y’wouldn’t do it with me.” It seems self-evident to Newt and his ears are still kind of ringing so he really wishes they could just get past this. He did, in fact, throw up quite a bit, and he’s kind of immune to bad smells at this point but his mouth tastes like eight kinds of hell.

“And has it ever occurred to your feeble and self-centered brain that I don’t want to walk in and find you’ve been fried by one of your goddamn makeshift devices?!” The hand around his throat tightens briefly before it is jerked away. “Himmel, arsch und Zwirn, Newton, Sie sind selbstsüchtig und leichtsinnig, und Sie werden sich den hals brechen!”

Now that is just  _unfairly_  hot, he thinks dazedly, listing sideways what he’s begun to realize is Hermann’s chair. “Aber— ich habe nicht—”

“Halt den Mund,” Hermann snaps, shoving a plastic cup of water and two pills into Newt’s hands. “You speak German like an American now, it’s painful. Take these and be quiet.”

“Yeah, well,” he mutters between gulps, “you still speak it like my great-grandmother, so.”

There is an extended period of silence then, in which Newt obediently drinks water under Hermann’s watchful glare and starts to feel significantly less dizzy. He notices for the first time that the kaiju is dozing on the other side of the room, head resting on its— _her_ —front feet.

Hermann sighs, uncrosses and re-crosses his arms. 

“What did you mean, ‘it’s a girl’?”

“Ah! Well. Not biologically, I’m sticking by my theory that she and her siblings would all have been hermaphrodites, but Baby chose team female at random. Or, maybe not random,” he admits when Hermann raises an eyebrow. “She kinda picked up on a memory of, uh. Of my mom, when I was little.” Newt stares down at the cup in his hands, pressing the flimsy sides in with his fingers. “Still not sure she understood the actual concept, but she doesn’t seem to give a crap what we call her anyway, so.”

Hermann’s fingers comb once through Newt’s hair and he can’t  _not_  lean into the touch, because he’s bone-tired and it feels amazing, even though his head hurts. He sighs and slumps down further in the chair, trying to get comfortable.

“No,” Hermann says, sharp and immediate. “You’re going to sleep in your quarters.”

“But on the other hand,” Newt counters with his eyes drooping shut, “you can keep an eye on me here, right?”

“There’s nothing wrong with you.”

“Pretty sure you’ve never said  _that_  before.”

“You’re not in any danger, now that you’ve stopped chasing your death wish,” Hermann clarifies through gritted teeth, which makes Newt feel guilty enough that he reaches out blind, swinging his hand out until he touches what is most likely Hermann’s thigh. From there he makes a lucky guess and manages to catch Hermann’s fingers with his own and hold on.

“Hey,” he murmurs sleepily. “Sorry. I won’t do it again.”

He’s rewarded by another brush of fingers through his hair, a nearly-inaudible whisper of “ _idiot._ ”

Hermann does end up dumping him on the floor to reclaim his chair—after a stealth excursion downstairs to put Baby back in her holding bay which he insists took ten years off his life—but he does it gently and digs up an old blanket to throw over him, which is quite possibly more than Newt deserves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My endless gratitude for [radiophile](http://radiophile.tumblr.com), a wonderful encouraging all-around delight of a person who puts up with my pre-posting insecurities, and her roommate [meltedpeep](http://meltedpeep.tumblr.com) who was kind enough to help me with the German; any errors remaining are mine. (Also, meltedpeep is working on a webcomic rn, and word on the street is you should go check it out. Yes, you.)
> 
> NOTE RE: GERMAN - Hermann says (in essence) "dammit, Newt, you're selfish and reckless and you're going to get yourself killed"; Newt stammers ineffectually and then is told to shut up.


	5. Chapter 5

Newt doesn’t like to brag, but—

(This is a lie. Newt loves to brag, especially when he’s proven Hermann wrong.)

—but the point is, he’d taken getting his back piece done like a fucking champ. It was the last part of the continuous neck-to-waist kaiju tattoo, and on the bright side it didn’t hurt nearly as much as the front and sides had. It helped that it was smaller, trailing off near his last thoracic vertebra because there was nothing so cool that it needed to be tattooed on or near his ass.

“You’re gettin’ good at this,” said Zabet, his artist of the last couple years, as she inked in the dark green over his shoulderblade. “Shame you’re gonna run outta skin.”

“Not too soon. I was thinking about getting Hammerjaw on my leg.”

“Yeah?” She leaned over to grab a different shade. “Gimme a picture and it’s all yours.”

Zabet, as she herself would say, was chill like that.

She worked out of a little tattoo shop in the suburb of Fairy Meadow, which Newt reached by a southbound coastal train—the sort of thing left running by the logic that kaiju would attack or they wouldn’t and nowhere was safe, so fuck it. Most of Zabet’s customers were surfers and uni students from Wollongong (and often, both); not many people wanted or could afford to get the kind of work Newt was looking for, so she’d leapt at the challenge.

And she was pretty phenomenal. Her specialty was hyperrealism, actually, but she was more than willing to give Newt a more old-fashioned-looking aesthetic when he asked for it—the only downside to his life’s work being that he could pick out every flaw in a “realistic” kaiju tattoo from twenty paces. Better to gloss over the details, go for maximum effect and less true detail.

Newt wore his softest old black button-down to work the morning after Zabet finished coloring, because he might’ve been a champ but he wasn’t superman and his skin still felt tender as hell. He managed to keep the whole thing incognito until the last straggler besides Newt and Hermann, Dr. Patel, slapped Newt’s back on his way out of the lab, and Newt couldn’t help hissing curse words under his breath.

“Have you managed to injure yourself?” Hermann asked from across the room. Newt looked up right away, but Hermann already had his eyes glued to the output of the program running on his main computer, like he couldn’t be bothered to pay attention to Newt for more than a second.

“Nah,” said Newt, only rolling his eyes a little. “Just finished the tattoo. _Shit_ ,” he added suddenly.

“Regretting the decision already?” 

“No, I— hey, back off, all right? I just forgot…” He took the tube of bacitracin out of his pocket and brandished it like it was some kind of evidence. “Got my neighbor to help me this morning, but it’s Wednesday night so I’m guessing he’s out wasted in a bar somewhere.”

Hermann just stared at him.

“So… I don’t suppose you wanna give me a hand? Good deed for the day, or something?”

The reading glasses came off, turned around and around in Hermann’s long restless fingers, but he still didn’t speak.

“All right, cool,” Newt said anyway, as if they’d agreed on something, and tugged off his bright turquoise tie. He went through the buttons on his shirt quickly, without looking up, then shrugged it off and tossed it onto someone else’s lab table.

“Any time, man.”

And it would be so fucking awkward if Hermann turned him down now, but he tried not to think about it, or hold his breath, or get a head start on all his regrets about this moment. Failure all around.

He heard a quiet clink—the glasses, maybe?—and the soft, uneven shuffle of footsteps, saw the bacitracin picked up in his peripheral vision. Decent indication that this might not go down as a complete disaster. It didn’t stop him from shivering when Hermann touched him for the first time.

His fingertips dabbed a bit of ointment onto Newt’s shoulderblade, where Zabet hadn’t done much new work, only to jerk back when he brushed the raised lines of black that still hadn’t gone down. “Oh, it’s—” Hermann breathed with this sort of shocked fascination, like he hadn’t meant to, and quickly went back to spreading the layer of bacitracin.

Newt had learned that Hermann had a lot of different silences, and he didn’t have to look to know that this was the one that folded inward, urged people to go about their business and ignore Hermann completely. And it usually worked, was the thing, on colleagues and tech workers and too-loud passerby in the streets. Newt had seen it happen again and again, almost like magic. Silence as a shield, while he himself dealt in precisely the reverse tactic.

It was harder to tell himself to just give up on Hermann, knowing how good he was at making that kind of silence. It made Newt want to spend years of his life pointedly _not_ ignoring the guy, just—just to prove him wrong. Another way to get under Hermann’s skin. 

So—

“Yep,” Newt said aloud, though it really wasn’t necessary. “That’s kinda what tattoos do. Guess this means you aren’t hiding any secret ink under all that, uh. No awful little spring break tats?”

Hermann was tracing lines on his back the way most people seemed to do automatically, as if the tattoo itself might be offended by aftercare that didn’t pay attention to detail. “None. Would it be the size or the spring break that made it awful?” Another cool dab of ointment, spread down the line of Newt’s spine with two fingers.

“Um.” It took a moment to concentrate on words again. “Both?”

And maybe he hadn’t really thought this through, but being there with most of the lab’s lights off and everyone else gone made it a little bit awkward to stand around half-naked being touched by the annoying and annoyingly pretty mathemetician he’d briefly wanted to bone when he met him in 2016 and had since totally, totally given up on.

Totally. 

Hermann’s fingers traced over his skin so lightly that Newt felt like shivering, but he kept his own hands flat on the table and bit his tongue, scraping it roughly between his teeth whenever he thought about opening his mouth to say _wanna have dinner_ or just _don’t stop touching me, please_ because saying those things would be stupid and saying stupid things around Hermann was always worse, somehow, than saying them in front of anyone else. Especially when he meant them.

“I believe that’s all of it,” Hermann said quietly a few minutes later, his hand on the back of Newt’s neck, and how could he not _know?_ He had to know, Newt felt like he could very easily die like this, with Hermann’s fingers halfway around his throat. He leaned over enough to grab his shirt, praying it would be long enough to cover the fact that he was half-hard just from—

“So.” He put his shirt back on gingerly, slowly, giving himself time, and turned around, not bothering with the tie.

Hermann was cleaning his fingers with one of Constanze’s alcohol wipes, gaze fixed on Newt’s torso like he could still see the lines of the tattoo; then he seemed to catch himself and his eyes flicked sideways. There was an odd, indecipherable expression on his face, but by the time he met Newt’s eyes again it had resolved itself into something harder.

“You really are an inveterate groupie, aren’t you,” he murmured, jaw tight.

It was a few weeks before they spoke to each other again.

 

\--

 

“So what are we going to name her?”

It’s no wonder Hermann makes such a great kaiju dad — the way exasperation fills up his entire _body_ , and some of the space surrounding, is pure parent.

“I take it Baby is insufficient?”

“Come on, man,” Newt urges, hands still slimy and bloody from the food he’d thawed and brought to the cargo bay. Their little kaiju is finishing her breakfast. “Baby’s just a stop-gap. Help me out here.”

Hermann, who is sitting on a crate nearby and no doubt about to be extremely insulting, is interrupted by the approach of the kaiju. She circles around him, rumbling cheerfully, before coming to a stop behind Hermann and resting her head very lightly on his shoulder. As usual, he attempts to rub her jawbone as if he doesn’t actually want to be doing it, like this giant alien beast just showed up out of nowhere and forced him to pet her.

The attempt is kind of ruined by the way Hermann murmurs _good girl,_ but he quickly rallies and says “Perhaps something from one of your monster movies.”

“You gotta be more specific,” says Newt, bouncing gleefully on the balls of his feet. “I watched _The Crawling Eye._ I watched _The Thing That Couldn’t Die_ , okay, and _Earth vs. The Spider_. My devotion is pure.”

“That’s one word for it,” says Hermann, with that look on his face like he’s regretting all of Newt’s choices so Newt won’t have to. It’s a more familiar look than perhaps it should be.

They’ve got a little less than two weeks left in Hong Kong; tomorrow Newt’s meeting Ashenafi to talk about details of K-Science relocation. With almost half of the ’dome already dismantled and sent off to designated building sites, they’ve had to move their little kaiju to a cargo bay scheduled to remain intact until the last of the PPDC personnel have departed. She’s closer to the lab now, which is great even if they did have to pay a tech triple overtime to reinforce the locks on her new room.

Though really, even if she did get loose, it’s not like she’d hurt anybody. Newt would give about even odds on whether she’d try to escape or just drag him up to the lab to drift again.

Baby-At-Least-Until-They-Think-of-Something-Better starts methodically shredding a bone with her teeth.

For a while the three of them sit in companionable near-silence. The kaiju chews, Hermann watches with a sort of resigned disgust and Newt considers the deeply unfortunate lack of good names in shitty horror films. ( _Them. The Beast._ And really, _Godzilla?_ so overdone.) Then he remembers he’s been drafted to check the next section of the Shatterdome for lost and mislaid items before it’s taken down, and that he should probably be meeting up with Tendo and the others instead of trying to think up baby names.

“Shit,” he says, loud enough to be heard over the crunching. “I’ve gotta run.”

“Yes. You’re about to be late.”

There’s no point in wondering why Hermann knows Newt’s schedule better than he does; it’s just the way things are. By now Newt has learned to just appreciate the help. Not that it’s particularly helpful, this time, but he figures he’s still in the doghouse for his latest attempt to Drift. Best not to push his luck, considering.

Rather than complain, he goes to the cargo bay door, unlocks the two shiny new inner locks and has almost shut it behind him when inspiration finally strikes. Newt ducks his head quickly back inside.

“Hey, you like Tolkien, right?” he asks, Hermann, clearly bewildered, says yes.

Which is why, later that day, a certain cargo bay door receives the addition of a handwritten sign that reads, _BALROG’S LAIR – BEWARE!_

 

\--

 

“I’ve gotta tell you, man,” Newt says, stealing another of Ashenafi’s chocolates, “there are state secrets less well-kept than the mystery of where I’m living next month. It’s weird.”

Ashenafi, who has just cued up an artist’s rendering of the new K-Science building on the giant screen in his office, gives him a nod and a rueful smile. “I understand, and I am sorry about all the mystery. We believed in the beginning that it would all be fairly straightforward, but in the end our negotiations had to be kept confidential for reasons of politics, and, so.”

He waves a hand at the finished artwork on the screen, which, unnecessary showmanship aside, is quite nice-looking — their own fortress nestled among the thick forest, a sprawling building covered in wide windows that gleam in imaginary sunshine. “I present to you the PPDC K-Science Outpost, to be built on the new Cape York International Preserve.”

Newt spits chocolate onto his shirt.

“Oh my god,” he says. It’s all he can manage for a long moment, during which he stands there stunned with his mouth hanging open about it, and then: “Oh my _god_ , seriously? Cape York like the—the whole—a fucking _peninsula_ , you — wait, are we relocating people?” he asks, tone hardening mid-sputter. “Because sorry, dude, but I have a strict no-relocation policy when it comes to Australia, it’s been done before and consensus says it was shitty.”

“That is the beauty of it.” Ashenafi looks so damn pleased with himself it’s a wonder he isn’t floating up off the ground. “For several years now, there’s been talk of encroaching on aboriginal lands as ‘emergency measures’ — which is, as I believe you would say, such bullshit. With Marshal Hansen’s help, we were not only able to stop the measures before they reached the parliament, but secure the peninsula as jointly owned property of PPDC and claimants for native title. Essentially, we’ll be investing our time and resources in the coastal areas damaged by kaiju blue, and leaving the undamaged land to the people it has always belonged to.” He shrugs, a little more subdued. “It’s far from perfect—”

“But nothing in that fucking country is,” finishes Newt, who only spent a few years in Australia but still wants to punch himself every time he so much as thinks of the words _terra nullius_.

Ashenafi tilts his head in acknowledgment. “As you say.”

“Okay. Okay, but once the coast is safe—even if it takes us a hundred years, if they want it back then, they can have it, okay, no questions asked. I don’t wanna be that asshole.”

“Included already in the contract,” says Ashenafi, with a delighted gleam in his eye.

“What, ‘don’t let Newt be an asshole’?”

“I believe the language is a little bit broader than that—but as you like.”

For a second they just stand there, grinning at each other.

Then: “Oh my god,” Newt says again, half-laughing. “Oh my _god._ You’ve gotta let me tell Hermann. He’s gonna lose his shit. Do you have any idea how many newly endangered species of bird are on that peninsula? Neither do I, because it’s fucking crazy. His life’s gonna be like _The Birds_ meets Jane Goodall, we’ll never hear from him again.” 

“Which would be a shame,” says Ashenafi gravely. “No simple task, getting two tenured positions at James Cook University.”

The sentence has its desired effect; Newt tries to sit down and ends up falling over a chair. By the time he remembers how to breathe and say words that aren’t _fuck_ or _what_ or _are you—seriously?_ , he’s almost late meeting Hermann for dinner.

 

\--

 

When something wakes Newt at two in the morning, he flings himself out of bed from force of habit, trips and ends up on the floor in a pile of clothes with no idea where he is. His quarters, not the cargo bay, which these days is unheard of. Must have fallen asleep sorting trash from things to pack. But if he’s here, and it’s now, then there wasn’t an alarm, right, so —?

There’s another loud knock on the door, which clears some things up. “Sekunde!” he yells, the old habit of flinging words out of order until he’s awake. “Um, gimme! I mean, warten Sie, a second, you—“ He drags a hand forcefully over his face. _English._ “Hang on a minute!”

Having drastically overestimated what he’d be able to get done last night, Newt finds himself shoving aside some piles of assorted crap and half-vaulting over others. It really is kind of amazing, the mess he’s managed to accumulate and the useless mountains he’s sorted it into. And the door opens in, which in retrospect would have been a good thing to consider, and which now means he has to shove with all his weight to get it open.

Hermann is standing on the other side.

He’s glaring at Newt, which—okay, is hardly unprecedented, but Newt had kind of hoped the news of their relocation site would get him more than one day on Hermann’s good graces. Forty-eight hours, at least. Maybe a hug or something.

From the look on Hermann’s face, he guesses that hugs aren’t on the agenda.

“Uh. Hey?”

“You’re just going to keep trying, aren’t you.”

“Wh—”

“It doesn’t matter what I say, you’re hell-bent on acting like an idiot. And by the way it’s insulting, really, the way you keep tinkering with the dampening agent as if you think I won’t notice. I’ve known you for ten years, Newton, and I know when you’re planning to do something ridiculous.”

“Didn’t notice last time,” Newt says without thinking, still trying very hard to lurch into the land of the living, and actually shrinks back from the look on Hermann’s face.

“I was giving you,” he growls between gritted teeth, “the benefit of the _doubt_.”

“Ah.” Newt winces. “And I, uh. Kind of screwed that one up.”

“To say the very least.”

“Uh,” he repeats, and rubs at his face again, blinking at the hallway light. “Fuck. Sorry, I mean. I wish I was awake. I’m not, like—”

“Newton,” Hermann snaps, and Newt shuts up. “If you persist, I swear I will disassemble the device so thoroughly that it will resemble nothing so much as metal shavings and dust. And the same will become of all your belongings, one by one, until you learn not to throw yourself off a cliff just to find out what’s at the bottom.”

It’s stupid that the stuttering beat of his own heart is what wakes Newt up, but seriously. _This guy._

“You know what I love about you?” he blurts out, unable to help himself, and tries not to falter when Hermann’s shoulders stiffen. Better to just barrel ahead “Anybody else would have just threatened Bal, you know? but you won’t, even though you’re, like, _intensely_ pissed off right now. And, and I’m not saying you don’t have reason to be or whatever, just. Thank you. For that.”

Hermann stares at him blankly for half a second, then frowns down the hallway at nothing.

“Tomorrow, then.”

“What?” Blinking helps Newt’s eyes adjust to the light but is otherwise unhelpful in making sense of what just happened. “Wait, what?”

“It’s safer with two, and you’re going to do it anyway. We meet at nine o’clock.” 

And he walks off without another word, his back still stiff and tense, cane tapping hard down the corridor until finally even the echoes of sound have faded.

“Oh,” Newt says to the empty air.

 

\--

 

Obviously, he’s not going to sleep after _that_ , so half an hour after Hermann’s visit Newt is back in the cargo bay visiting Bal. She is deeply uninterested in showing signs of life, attached as she is to her twelve hours of sleep per night, and he ends up leaning against her side, reading up on the CYIP legal agreement and reports on the current Cape York Peninsula cleanup status. Pretty much the whole eastern side of Australia is an ecological shitstorm, and a hundred years might not be such a bad guess for how long it’ll take them to fix what they can.

“He actually _agreed_ ,” he whispers every so often, waiting for it to sink in or stop being true.

Neither happens, and Bal just vibrates companionably in her sleep, making the steady humming sound that seems to be the kaiju equivalent of snoring.

Around six, Newt runs out of reading material, and then there’s nothing to do but wait.

 

\--

 

At 9:07, he’s just about ready to jump out of his skin.

He snuck Bal up into the lab at 7:30 and found a steaming cup of coffee on the countertop, along with a note saying _See you at nine – do try not to hurt yourself._ Now the coffee is long gone, Hermann is patting Bal’s nose and murmuring to her, and Newt is triple-checking every inch of circuitry because somehow it’s _more_ nerve-wracking to not be doing this alone.

_Okay_ , he tells himself, straightening up and trying to keep his hands still. Now or never, or something like that.

“Okay.” The word is shaky when Newt says it aloud, and he knows Hermann will have noticed. “Looks like we’re all set, if you’re— I mean, are you sure you, uh—?”

“Oh, do get on with it,” Hermann says, as if his knuckles aren’t white on the grip of his cane.

“ _Thank you_.” Newt’s voice is raw, too honest; he flips the switch to stop himself and it’s

dizzying sudden **hello** _there you are_ and yes, there they all are

it’s as if there’s a physical distance, like the kaiju has been pushed back in their awareness and they can—breathe, or something— _physical description of nonphysical phenomena, you of all people should know better (oh shut up I’m just trying to – feel it out, you know)_ and that link may be manageable, dimmed, but the other

they are

**_do you know what I love about you_ **

_they are in a memory of Hermann, young, sitting on the floor curled around himself in a school uniform waiting for them to go away why won’t they leave him alone he hasn’t done anything to them_

_trying to wipe mud from every page of his new physics book before Father can see_

**_vicious creatures_** _,_ the kaiju thinks and Newt can feel that somewhere far away his body is laughing

_they are standing with Newt on an empty campus sidewalk in the middle of the night, half-asleep in his bed in Sydney tangled in someone else, at his mother’s grave in the weak grey light of morning_ and Bal needs to know _what has changed, why are we different_

the loss of immediacy frightens her, like _breathing through a tank of air instead of tasting the sky, wading out into waters tainted blue_ , a lifeline without solid ground, but she reaches in and understands and does not want to hurt them

_Hermann’s hands wrapped around a coffee cup, clutching, Hermann’s hands tossing out crumbs to the birds, wooden slats of the bench and the faint yellow sun_

_a blaze that should be blinding but is only warm in memory, moving through a viscous atmosphere (it is empty here, empty sky and empty echoes without Joining) clinging onto the parent’s armored back – not here; not for her; there was nothing but the empty sea to welcome her_

even now, Newt’s not above feeling triumphant that he was _right_

_home — she examines the word and is puzzled, with all of them Joined there was no place without belonging, no need for demarcation of home and not-home; a word for the small and separate creatures – a wave of something like pity for lonely human bodies_

_she wonders what a human home is like and, well,_

**_you know_ **

_the lab of course (their minds turn towards it in unison) always at home in the lab whether back in sydney with coworkers and funding or what they have now, half and half and whole, bad coffee weak tea digging food from the fridge, constant hum of machinery and that infernal noise he calls music – hey excuse you_

**_I love_ **

_the edges of the tattoo that rise up just above Newt’s collar distracting and wanting to yank the cloth aside and **bite**_  

what

_clean green-black surfaces, the smell of chalk and ammonia, alarms in the dead of night_

no seriously, _what_

**_you_ **

The connection is broken and they both stagger back, shoving the caps off their heads. Bal is rumbling in a way that doesn’t _sound_ perplexed, exactly, but Newt can still feel that she is, that she doesn’t know what’s going on or why her humans are acting so strangely.

He doesn’t look at her, because the endless wide expanse of time and thought and Drift in his mind has narrowed to nothing but Hermann, and Hermann is standing in front of him looking breathless and shocked and _terrified_.

“I,” he stammers. “I only—”

“God, get _over_ here,” Newt breathes, and pulls him forward by his stupid vest.

Hermann stumbles into him a bit, which is hardly a problem because it means Newt can grab his face and start kissing him, and the sound Hermann makes is so small and shocked that Newt’s heart kind of aches. He wants to wrap this dude up in a big blanket with a fuck-ton of gross tea and keep him away from shitty people for at _least_ a year, possibly longer.

And then have sex with him, a lot. Just to be clear.

“Wait,” he stops, reluctantly, tries to remember how his own lungs work. “You’re okay? No hemorrhaging, or—?” He pulls back enough to get a look at Hermann’s face, which is totally worth if because Hermann is _smiling at him_.

“Just fine,” he murmurs, and straightens up enough to kiss Newt’s forehead. It’s so unexpectedly sweet that Newt doesn’t know what to do with his hands or his face, just knows he’d like to have Hermann’s mouth back on his, _now_.  

They are interrupted by the crash of Bal’s makeshift cap falling to the floor, directly precipitated by her clawing at it unnoticed by either of them. When they jerk apart, startled and disheveled, she is staring at them sulkily.

“Um,” Newt says, feeling unsteady in many ways. “Okay. I think I need to go put the baby to bed.”

 

\--

 

Hermann fucks the way he does just about anything— that is to say, carefully, thoroughly, with intense attention to detail and the sharp competitive edge that always drives Newt crazy in one way or another.

This way, admittedly, is the best by far.

 

\--

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Almost done! You're all wonderful and I love you to excess.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This last chapter (and the whole story, really) is for radiophile, who kept me writing and kept me sane. I could not have done it without you <3

They’re leaving tomorrow. Somehow, this has managed to take Newt by surprise.

In his defense, the endless packing had lulled him into a false sense of security—like something that took so freaking long couldn’t ever actually be done with, until suddenly he was signing off on shipping manifests and staring around at empty walls of an empty lab and a pile of suitcases in his quarters. He always forgets about the hollow ring of sounds in a vacant room.

Today they’ve been cleaning out the dregs of their belongings, which means that Newt went to make sure all the samples had been removed from the industrial freezer, uncovered the pints of tacky “Kaiju Blue” novelty ice cream, and is now attempting to eat them all in one day.

“It’s not even the bright blue that’s weird,” he says, sprawled on Hermann’s bed and staring, contemplative, into the container. “It’s the little bits of dark blue floating around in here, like what the hell is that even made of? Melted gumdrops?”

“You’re the one eating your second pint. What does it taste like?”

“I really can’t tell, it’s just sort of…frozen. And sticky. But I’m pretty sure it’s gonna be in my teeth for years, so you’ll find out sooner or later.”

“You are vile,” Hermann informs him, which is pretty well contradicted by the way he lays a hand on Newt’s ankle in passing. He’s pacing between the closet and his last open bag, shoving in lost mismatched socks and books he couldn’t bear to pack away earlier.

“You love me.” (Newt’s been saying that a lot in the past couple days, and he’s only just started hitting the right note of lazy confidence – at first he could only repeat the words, stunned, like he was waiting for the world to come to its senses, for it to stop being true.) “Tell you what, for every quickie we have between now and tomorrow, I’ll throw out one of these dessert abominations, what do you say?”

Hermann flushes and glares like someone who hopes that the ice cream will have approximately the same effect on Newt’s innards as its toxic, biohazardous namesake. But before he can begin to express these sentiments at length, Tendo arrives and interrupts them.

“Knock, knock,” he says cheerfully, leaning in the open doorway.

Newt, never one to take rescue for granted, sits up with a bit more enthusiasm than he might otherwise have. “Hey man, what’s up?”

“Just a heads-up, you’re gonna need to file a TLC94 for the, uh.” He checks the ragged notepad in his hand, one eyebrow raised. “That rhino we’re moving to Cairns this afternoon.”

“Sure thing.” In a rare display of compliance, for him, Newt grabs his tablet off Hermann’s bedside table and starts cuing up the proper form. Dull as hell, but the last thing he plans on doing is jeopardizing Bal’s ticket out of here. “Can I just say I love that it’s called a TLC?”

“That’s the Corps for you. We’re fascists, but we’re funny.”

“Aww. You know I only called you that once when I was mad. Maybe twice.”

“Words hurt, Geiszler.” 

“So does the careless destruction of ecosystems, you fucking fascist,” Newt says amiably, ignoring Hermann’s quiet groan of despair. “God, there I go again.”

“Go and cry to the cities we saved, tree-hugging hippie scum.”

“Five hundred words or less, please explain to me how our species is the only thing on the goddamn planet worth thinking about. Bomb-throwing neanderthal.”

“I hope you get eaten by dingoes your first night out. Join the ecosystem for real.”

“I hope you never find out how long bow ties have been out of style.”

“God, please, tell me more about style, I’m dying to learn from you.”

“Uncalled for. Want some ice cream?”

“Not if you paid me.”

“Yeah,” Newt looks at the spoon where it’s standing, perfectly upright, in one of those as-yet-unidentified blue bits, like a flag planted right at the pinnacle of all his bad decisions. “Can’t say I blame you there. So, move-out. How’s it going?”

“Not bad, not bad. One more week ’til me and Alison finally go on our honeymoon.”

“Right! Yeah, guess you waited long enough. Nice beach somewhere?”

“Don’t even joke about it. We’re going to the Alps.”

“German, Swiss, or Austrian?” From Hermann, who treats those mountains like grandchildren carefully ranked in his will based on who’s managed to curry the most favor, it’s not an unexpected question. What makes it odd is the way he and Newt say it together, in perfect unison.

“Uh,” says Tendo, blinking. “French, actually.”

Across the room Hermann mutters something huffy and disgruntled about the Massif du Mont-Blanc, too low to be heard. He is rustling loudly through his closet, as if the noise of hangers clicking together will somehow keep Newt and Tendo from ever having existed.

Which leaves Newt, of course, to face the music alone.

He stares blankly at Tendo, racking his brain for something pithy and maybe insulting to say that does not involve the weather today or mountains he’s never seen. It’s possible Newt glances over, once or twice, at Hermann.

It’s possible his poker face is _pathetic._

Maybe that’s giveaway enough, or maybe Tendo finally notices the frankly fucking _awesome_ hickey Newt’s sporting on his neck, right where his tattoo gives way to blank skin. Either way, his eyebrows shoot up and he opens, then soundlessly closes, his mouth.

“Oh,” he finally says. “Wow.”

Newt can _feel_ Hermann tensing up for a smart remark or a fight, but Tendo just shrugs one-shouldered and gives them wry smile. “So — don’t actually hate each other, then.”

“Nah,” says Newt, grinning way too hard and suddenly unable to stop.

“Well, hey, congratulations, you guys.”

“Thanks! Yeah. It’s— it’s good.” 

Hermann is trying, if possible, to actually become one with the scant remaining contents of his closet.

“You know,” Newt tells him, grinning over his shoulder at the sight, “the closet puns I could make here are really just—”

“Oh _will_ you shut up,” Hermann seethes, turning on his heel. Tendo sends them the shitty picture from his cell phone later, with a smiley face for a caption — Newt blurred with laughter, one arm raised in defense, while Hermann calls him an insufferable chatterbox and tries not to look just a little bit pleased.

(Bad quality or no, Newt prints it out and frames it.)

 

\--

 

“It’s gonna be great,” he tells Balrog as they sit together in her reinforced cage in the modified PPDC aircraft carrier. Around them techs are preparing it for take-off under the watchful, somewhat terrifying eye of Hermann, who asks a lot of pointed questions about acceptable environments and keeping away unnecessary stress. “I mean, this part might suck, and I’m sorry we’ve gotta go separately, but when we get there you’ll love it, I promise. And we’ll be right behind you. We can hang out in quarantine together, okay?”

Newt isn’t sure what, if any, English their little kaiju understands, but he still stays leaned up against Bal’s scaly side anyway, waiting for some kind of sign.

She rattles quietly, almost like a sigh, then lays her head down as if to say _Well, if I must._

 

\--

 

T minus twenty minutes. Newt feels like he’ll never dispel all this nervous energy, mingled excitement and dread and relief that it’s over, they are leaving, they are done. What’s left of the Shatterdome is empty. Everything is packed. Whatever little scrap of home they’d managed to make for themselves and each other, it’s gone now, and it’s time to go and make a new one.

In twenty years, how much will he remember? How much will he want to forget?

It’s not the way Newt usually thinks, but then, it’s a pretty unusual day. In less than eight hours they’ll have landed at CNS, and by the end of the month he and Hermann will be living on the Cape York Peninsula. They’re going to have to spend some time in quarantine first, because Australia has been burned often enough when it comes to invasive species and they’re kind of already bending that rule in a big, _big_ way. Once they get released from the facility in Cairns, they’ve opted to stay in a little one-story house near the construction site until the new K-Science building is closer to complete.

Hermann is already on the plane, the last of his goodbyes complete, leaving Newt standing out on the runway alone with Marshal Hansen and his dog. He could have avoided this, if he really wanted to, but somehow it seemed cowardly. He didn’t want to end it like that.

Which unavoidably raises the question of how Newt _does_ want to end things here.

It’s a nice day for being outside, by his standards, cloudy and a little windy but not too cold. Still, he shoves his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket and pulls it close around him.

“So, uh. Sorry I was a dick about stuff.”

A smile, or its shadow, slips over the tired lines of Hansen’s face. “You’re a good man,” he says, reaching out to shake Newt’s hand, “and there’s no denying you’ve done some amazing things. I wish you the best, mate.”

“Oh, uh, yeah, I mean.” He’d thought of nice things to say just for the occasion, too, but they’ve evaporated now and Newt has to settle for quick, emphatic nods of agreement. “You too.”

At their feet, Max whines loudly. He doesn’t do so well with goodbyes anymore.

Newt finds himself hoping, in a rare burst of sentiment, that Hansen catches a break after this, that he can retire somewhere far away, some place where the ghosts of the past aren’t breathing quite so closely down his neck. A cabin in the mountains or a noisy anonymous city, just—something. A tiny bit of peace, if it’s not too much to ask.

“Been an honor, sir,” he says, and for once, he means it.

 

\--

 

Their temporary house in the CYIP is small and humid and bland, and the hot water only works when the pipes are feeling charitable. The bed squeaks so industriously that Newt had to stop in the middle of breaking it in for a full-scale laughing fit; it took another hour before Hermann was speaking to him again. All their dishes are chipped or cracked and the antivenom kit in the kitchen looks like half of Frankenstein’s lab stuffed unlabeled in a paint box.

Newt loves the place so much it’s a bit indecent.

Too far away to be heard, Ashenafi’s construction team is assembling the K-Science building by day, and everything from the old lab is being held back in Cairns until it can be safely, properly stored. Somewhere in the dark, moonlit woods around the house, Bal is exploring her new domain.

(The importance of not going off, Godzilla-style, and terrorizing people or towns has been very firmly impressed upon her through their most recent Drift. Newt’s pretty sure it’s going to be enough, but he did put a tracker on her, just in case.)

It’s late, and their stupid squeaky bed feels huge and soft, and everything is— freakishly perfect.

Still. 

“It’s tragic,” Newt says around a yawn.

“Hm. What is?” 

“We could’ve been having sex for the last _ten years_.”

Hermann’s sides shake gently, just enough for Newt to know he’s laughing. “But I would never have gotten any work done,” he remarks, and then goes still. When Newt looks up at him, his face has flushed red in the dim glow of the lamp across the room. “I— what I mean is—”

“I know what you mean. Come here.”

Even embarrassed, Hermann can manage an annoyed huff. “I _am_ here.”

So fucking stubborn all the time. Newt rolls his eyes and rolls on top of Hermann in one quick motion. “Well, good,” he says, settling in. “It’s a start.”

 

_\- end -_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To say I've been overwhelmed by the positive response to this story barely begins to cover it. I'm so ridiculously grateful to everyone who enjoyed reading HTTYK over the past eight months, and all the wonderful people I've been able to interact with here or on tumblr because of it. You've all been so kind and encouraging and enthusiastic, and I love you a lot. <3 GROUP HUG, ETC.


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